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Delegation and Discretion in Anticipation of Coalitional Drift

University of Georgia, Athens, sainswor{at}uga.edu

Brian M. Harward

Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, bharwar{at}siue.edu

If legislators are sensitive to coalitional drift, they must perforce be forward looking. In this article, we propose that legislators anticipate change in government—and any associated coalitional drift. That is, legislators recognize that the government could move from unified to divided or divided to unified. As such, how legislators structure an agency’s discretion may be affected by the current partisan control of the Congress and the White House as well as their anticipated partisan control. Using U.S. trade legislation data from 1890 to 1990, we find strong empirical evidence that legislators alter agency discretion prior to changes in the political status quo.

Key Words: legislative behavior • bureaucracy • U.S. Congress • coalitional drift • political control of bureaucracy • divided government

American Politics Research, Vol. 37, No. 6, 983-1002 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X09334770


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