Political Disagreement and Delegation in a Multi-Level Governance Setting

A large share of delegation models takes into account the effect of political disagreement when explaining delegation. Yet, delegation models make sharply contrasting predictions on how political disagreement translates into the level of discretion delegated to agencies. Moreover, empirical findings are contradictory. The current paper addresses this puzzle by disentangling mechanisms driving the effect of political disagreement on delegation. Furthermore, we distinguish conditions interacting with the effect of political disagreement on discretion. We apply the conditions to the research context of the present paper: economic restructuring in the UK under New Labour, which took place in a multi-level governance setting. We derive hypotheses on the effect of political disagreement on discretion and explore our theoretical predictions with the use of a novel dataset on economic restructuring in the UK under New Labour (Bennett and Payne 2000). Our analysis show that political disagreement leads to lower levels of discretion delegated.