Governing Under Overload: Ministerial Rulemaking as a Coping Strategy

In parliamentary systems, a substantial share of policy implementation and regulatory detail is produced after primary legislation through secondary legislation drafted and stipulated by ministerial bureaucracies. This form of rulemaking constitutes a core yet often overlooked dimension of administrative workload. As policy demands expand while administrative capacities remain constrained, ministries face pressures when translating legislative mandates into operative rules, also given persistent organizational strain. Yet we know little about how political and administrative factors shape how ministries manage this delegated authority in practice. This paper examines ministerial rulemaking as a response to administrative overload. It argues that the activation of delegated authority reflects not only political incentives, but also bureaucratic strategies for coping with sustained implementation demands. Ministries vary in how intensively and continuously they use secondary legislation, and this variation reflects attempts to manage workload, prioritize tasks, and sequence regulatory activity under capacity constraints. These dynamics differ systematically across policy sectors, where regulatory complexity, salience, and implementation pressure vary. Empirically, the paper draws on a new longitudinal dataset covering all ministerial decrees issued in Germany between 1949 and 2025. We measure the volume and sequencing of decrees issued under each enabling act to capture patterns of regulatory activation over time. This allows us to distinguish between concentrated bursts of rulemaking and more gradual, incremental regulatory strategies. We combine these data with indicators of the varying party-political context and especially with policy-specific features of enachting acts, as these also differ in terms of activating implementation intensity. The analysis shows that broad delegations in enabling acts and ideologically cohesive governments are associated with more intensive use of secondary legislation, enabling ministries to process regulatory demands more efficiently. At the same time, highly salient policies tend to produce steadier but more cautious rulemaking trajectories, reflecting heightened political scrutiny and risk sensitivity. By conceptualizing secondary legislation as a form of workload management rather than merely a legal by-product, the paper contributes to debates on overburdened bureaucracies and administrative capacity. It highlights how central bureaucracies respond to sustained implementation pressure by structuring, sequencing, and managing regulatory output—revealing how modern states govern under conditions of allegedly chronic overload.