The Legislation-Administration Nexus in Political Economy

The analytical object that animates this chapter is the relation between legislation and administration within democratic systems. There is a long-standing piece of civics idealization that claims that legislatures enact law, and executive agencies implement that law. To create a trio, moreover, that idealization further asserts that courts interpret the exact meaning of law whenever controversy arises. This idealization predates the entry of public choice theorizing into academic discourse, and the result of that discourse has been to generate much new insight into the operation of political processes. The impact of that insight reveals just how naïve the old civics idealization was. Yet schoolchildren are still taught that these three branches are distinct, and that this separation of powers creates checks and balances within our government. In this chapter, we explore how the clear distinction between creation and administration of the law has broken down. Entanglement does not only characterize interconnections between the public and private sectors, but there has also been a slow erosion of the boundaries between what constitutes legislative and administrative activity. The goal of this chapter is to explore some of the implications of this breakdown.