BiblioVault - Books about Delegation

Empowering Exporters

Reciprocity, Delegation, and Collective Action in American Trade Policy

Michael J. Gilligan

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Until the New Deal, most groups seeking protection from imports were successful in obtaining relief from Congress. In general the cost of paying the tariffs for consumers was less than the cost of mounting collective action to stop the tariffs. In 1934, with the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, all of this changed. The six decades that followed have produced a remarkable liberalization of trade policy in the United States. This occurred despite the fact that domestic politics, according to some of the best developed theories, should have prevented this liberalization.

Michael Gilligan argues that liberalization has succeeded because it has been reciprocal with liberalization in other countries. Our trade barriers have been reduced as an explicit quid pro quo for reduction of trade barriers in other countries. Reciprocity, Gilligan argues, gives exporters the incentive to support free trade policies because it gives them a clear gain from free trade and thus enables the exporters to overcome collective action problems. The lobbying by exporters, balancing the interests of groups seeking protection, changes the preferences of political leaders in favor of more liberalization.

Gilligan tests his theory in a detailed exploration of the history of American trade policy and in a quantitative analysis showing increases in the demand for liberalization as the result of reciprocity in trade legislation from 1890 to the present. This book should appeal to political scientists, economists, and those who want to understand the political underpinnings of American trade policy.

Michael J. Gilligan is Assistant Professor of Politics, New York University.

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King Demos

Democracy and Delegation in Ancient Greece

Andrew T. Alwine

University of Texas Press

How ancient Greek democracies wrestled with the tension between egalitarianism and hierarchical structures necessary for organized government.

Democracy and egalitarianism are ever in tension. The ideal of direct democracy—equal participation in all aspects of governance—coexists with the reality that hierarchical structures are necessary to organize and stabilize the workings of the state. This tension consumed America’s founders. And two thousand years earlier, it had consumed the people of Athens.

King Demos shows how ancient Greek democracies wrestled with this problem, crafting what the Federalist Papers would later dream of, “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” As Athens grew and direct democracy became unwieldy, the Greeks developed a system of delegation, with the “people” (demos) conceived as a king with authority over a sprawling system of state officials whose day-to-day operation was handled by experts. Hierarchical structures became commonplace in the city, yet sovereign powers remained with the citizenry. Andrew Alwine argues that delegation was a stepping stone between direct and representative democracy and provided a crucial compromise, enabling the Greeks to benefit from the abilities of elite citizens while also keeping them under control.

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The Logic of Delegation

D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Why do majority congressional parties seem unable to act as an effective policy-making force? They routinely delegate their power to others—internally to standing committees and subcommittees within each chamber, externally to the president and to the bureaucracy. Conventional wisdom in political science insists that such delegation leads inevitably to abdication—usually by degrees, sometimes precipitously, but always completely.

In The Logic of Delegation, however, D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins persuasively argue that political scientists have paid far too much attention to what congressional parties can't do. The authors draw on economic and management theory to demonstrate that the effectiveness of delegation is determined not by how much authority is delegated but rather by how well it is delegated.

In the context of the appropriations process, the authors show how congressional parties employ committees, subcommittees, and executive agencies to accomplish policy goals. This innovative study will force a complete rethinking of classic issues in American politics: the "autonomy" of congressional committees; the reality of runaway federal bureaucracy; and the supposed dominance of the presidency in legislative-executive relations.

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