Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T00:25:18.348Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Understanding Delegation Through Machine Learning: A Method and Application to the European Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2019

L. JASON ANASTASOPOULOS Open the ORCID record for L. JASON ANASTASOPOULOS [Opens in a new window]  and
ANTHONY M. BERTELLI Open the ORCID record for ANTHONY M. BERTELLI [Opens in a new window]
L. JASON ANASTASOPOULOS*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
ANTHONY M. BERTELLI*
Affiliation:
Bocconi University and Pennsylvania State University
*
*L. Jason Anastasopoulos, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Assistant Professor of Public Administration and Policy, University of Georgia, [email protected].
†Anthony M. Bertelli, Professor of Political Science, Bocconi University; Sherwin-Whitmore Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Delegation of powers represents a grant of authority by politicians to one or more agents whose powers are determined by the conditions in enabling statutes. Extant empirical studies of this problem have relied on labor-intensive content analysis that ultimately restricts our knowledge of how delegation has responded to politics and institutional change in recent years. We present a machine learning approach to the empirical estimation of authority and constraint in European Union (EU) legislation, and demonstrate its ability to accurately generate the same discretionary measures used in an original study directly using all EU directives and regulations enacted between 1958–2017. We assess validity by training our classifier on a random sample of only 10% of hand-coded provisions and replicating an important substantive finding. While our principal interest lies in delegation, our method is extensible to any context in which human coding has been profitably produced.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 291 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank Fabio Franchino for providing the data and for helpful comments. Nicola Palma, Maulik Shah and Giulia Leila Travaglini provided excellent assistance in data collection and preparation. We thank Moritz Osnabrugge, Matia Vannoni, Arthur Spirling, Erik Voeten and Michael Bailey for helpful comments. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FF3DQM.

References

REFERENCES

Ash, Elliott, Morelli, Massimo, and Vannoni, Matia. 2018. Civil Service Reform in US States: Structural Causes and Impacts on Delegation. Technical Report, Mimeo.Google Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Conway, Drew, Lauderdale, Benjamin E., Laver, Michael, and Mikhaylov, Slava. 2016. “Crowd-sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data.” American Political Science Review 110 (2): 278–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Watanabe, Kohei, Wang, Haiyan, Nulty, Paul, Obeng, Adam, Mller, Stefan, and Matsuo, Akitaka. 2018. “Quanteda: An R Package for the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data.” Journal of Open Source Software 3 (30): 774.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clinton, Joshua D., Bertelli, Anthony M., Grose, Christian R., Lewis, David E., and Nixon, David C.. 2012. “Separated Powers in the United States: The Ideology of Agencies, Presidents, and Congress.” American Journal of Political Science 56 (2): 341–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clouser McCann, Pamela J. 2016. The Federal Design Dilemma. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, David, and O’Halloran, Sharyn. 1999. Delegating powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making under Separate powers. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franchino, Fabio. 2004. “Delegating Powers in the European Community.” British Journal of Political Science 34 (2): 269–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franchino, Fabio. 2007. The Powers of the Union: Delegation in the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimmer, Justin, and Stewart, Brandon M.. 2013. “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts.” Political Analysis 21 (3): 267–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, John D., and Shipan, Charles R.. 2002. Deliberate Discretion? The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, John D., Shipan, Charles R., and Pfahler, Madelaine. 2001. “Legislatures and Statutory Control of Bureaucracy.” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2): 330–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakkaraju, Himabindu, Bach, Stephen H., and Leskovec, Jure. 2016. “Interpretable Decision Sets: A Joint Framework for Description and Prediction.” In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: ACM, 1675–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lavertu, Stéphane. 2012. “Issue-Specific Political Uncertainty and Policy Insulation in US Federal Agencies.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 29 (1): 145–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayhew, David R. 1991. Divided We Govern. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
O’Halloran, Sharyn, Maskey, Sameer, McAllister, Geraldine, Park, David K., and Chen, Kaiping. 2015. “Big Data and the Regulation of Financial Markets.” In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2015: ACM, 1118–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Halloran, Sharyn, Chen, Karen, Biswas, Rudra M. Guha, Kim, Hoon, Liu, Pu, Zhang, YouFei, and Zhou, YunPeng. 2018. “Delegating Regulation: European Union and Financial Markets.” In Annales des Mines-Realites industrielles. Vol. 4: FFE, 91–111.Google Scholar
Vakilifathi, Mona. 2017. “Constraining Bureaucrats Today Knowing You’ll Be Gone Tomorrow: The Effect of Legislative Term Limits on Statutory Discretion.” Policy Studies Journal. Published online first 25 August 2017. doi: 10.1111/psj.12215.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Anastasopoulos and Bertelli Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FF3DQM
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Anastasopoulos and Bertelli supplementary material

Anastasopoulos and Bertelli supplementary material

Download Anastasopoulos and Bertelli supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 2.3 MB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.