Legislative direction of regulatory bureaucracies: evidence from a semi-presidential system

ABSTRACT

Independent regulatory agency has become the standard institutional choice in Western Europe. Little is known, however, about the involvement of legislators in their design and in their monitoring. In this paper, we analyse ex-ante and ex-post legislative involvement for 48 regulatory agencies enacted in France. We show that legislators debate and design more substantially agencies for which the government bill has already granted them more powers to appoint members to their board, or to be appointed as board members themselves. Once enacted, agencies that allow greater participation by legislators in their decision-making are subject to greater scrutiny, and this even after controlling for routine oversight activities. Regulatory domains matter, though only for ex-post legislative oversight. These results suggest that legislative involvement is selective and driven by strategic considerations. More fundamentally, they imply that legislative involvement could be more important in regulatory agency activities than usually assumed.

KEYWORDS:

• France
• semi-presidential
• regulation
• oversight
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Strøm (2012) for a discussion of legislative roles in connection to policy expertise, office-seeking and career paths.

2 http://www.senat.fr accessed 1 March 2021.

3 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr accessed 1 March 2021.

4 Table A1 in the Online Appendix lists all agencies that are included in the analysis. Table A2 displays descriptive statistics.

5 As a comparison, the average size of enacted law in France between 2008 and 2018 was 3847 with, however, significant variation. ‘Big Laws’ and ‘Financial Laws’ are for instance respectively 30,662 and 36,212 long on average (Rozenberg, 2021).

6 See Table A3 and A4 in the Online Appendix.

7 We applied log transformation of the dependent variables to reduce their skewness.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondation nationale des sciences politiques – SAB Research Grant.

Notes on contributors

Cyril Benoît

Cyril Benoît is CNRS Researcher at CEE, Sciences Po. His research interests are broadly in comparative political economy, with an emphasis on regulatory politics, corporate influence in policy-making and legislative-administrative relations. He has recently co-edited the Handbook of Parliamentary studies (Edward Elgar, with Olivier Rozenberg).

Ana-Maria Szilagyi

Ana-Maria Szilagyi is PhD. candidate in Political Science at CEVIPOF, Sciences Po. Trained in philosophy, politics and economics, she specializes in political theory in her dissertation.