The Federal Design Dilemma: Congressional Intergovernmental Delegation.

Abstract

When policymakers craft legislation, they make decisions about who is responsible for the implementation of the policy, including whether to delegate responsibility to the states versus keep authority at the national level. The variety of federal delegation options offers a number of intergovernmental design alternatives for policymakers, creating a federal design dilemma. I argue that previous scholars ignore what I call the intergovernmental context—namely that legislators come from specific states and consider how their state will implement policy if authority is delegated to the state level. I incorporate this feature along with political uncertainty over implementation in a theory of intergovernmental delegation of policy responsibility. I use two stylized models of legislators allocating authority to their states and the national executive branch and bargaining amongst themselves over such allocation. I argue the difference in the preferences of a pivotal intergovernmental team of legislators in Congress from those of their states and that of the national executive branch along with state and national political uncertainty explain how much authority states are given in national law. I create a novel dataset spanning over thirty years and 179 significant pieces of legislation containing more than 24,000 provisions in which to examine the hypotheses derived from the theory. I test the theory of intergovernmental delegation against current explanations of decentralization: Republican devolution, average partisan congruence between Congress and the states, and decentralization by policy type. I also consider policy coalition formation in the House and Senate to examine predictions from the bargaining model regarding the pivotal intergovernmental team. Overall, I find support for the theory of intergovernmental delegation of authority across a wide range of specifications and estimation choices. Current explanations, though, fail to explain decentralization of policy implementation in this broader dataset. Additionally, a case study of the health insurance reform process of 2009-2010 assesses the underlying mechanisms in the theory and provides additional support for my argument. These results demonstrate the importance of recognizing the impact of national and state political contexts, or the intergovernmental context, in delegation decisions and explicitly modeling the states and national agents both theoretically and empirically.