Understanding Delegation of Regulatory Authority Using Computational Text Analysis and Institutional Grammar 2.0

In democratic countries, regulatory policies often convey the delegation of regulatory powers from the legislative to the executive branch. Existing studies on delegation, while offering useful insights on the extent to which delegation is occurring, fail to account for variation in the scope of delegation encountered in regulation. Such variation in delegation is difficult to assess when analysts look only for the frequency of delegation provisions. Furthermore, variation in legislation structure through which delegation provisions are communicated make it difficult to compare delegation across countries, policy areas, and time. In this research, we present a novel method for understanding types of delegation encountered in legislation that relies on the decomposition of legal provisions (or statements) using computational text analysis techniques and an increasingly prominent approach for analyzing policy design, called Institutional Grammar. These are applied to nearly 17,000 statements found in British legislation between 1991 and 2015. Our approach enables us to systematically identify the prevalence of different forms of delegation as well as how delegated activities are linked. The latter is conceptualized as delegation complexity. We present preliminary findings on delegation patterns across different policy areas.