Dilemmas of European Integration: The Ambiguities and Pitfalls of Integration by Stealth

"Majone is probably Europe’s best thinker on these issues. He is neglected in the United States, to their cost I think. Although Dilemmas is partly about Europe, this book also usefully summarises the account Majone developed in earlier work of the warrant for delegation to technocrats. He distinguishes very helpfully between two types of delegation. One is to an agency that is literally the political principal’s agent, whose job is to do what the elected politician wants done but doesn’t have the time or technical expertise to do him or herself. So if the politician has set the agent a vague mandate, the agent must consult back on what the politician wants them to do or, if they can’t do that, the agent has a duty to make a judgment about what their political boss would want them to do. The risk here is that, rather than faithfully sticking to their duty, the agent may wander off the ranch, pursuing either their own self-interest or their own view of the public interest. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Obviously that is not a model for an independent agency at all, because their leaders are not meant to keep going back to their political principal. The other type of delegation Majone describes is quite different, involving what he calls is a fiduciary relationship (and in my book I call them “trustees”). The idea is that the elected politicians want to commit to a particular policy but, as elected politicians, they can’t be trusted to stick to that objective themselves because the imperative of being re-elected, of being more popular than the opposition political party, will always dominate in the short-run. So instead the politicians appoint somebody who is obliged to stick to the trust deed—the legislated mandate—but is not obliged to go back and consult the politicians on what they should do on particular decisions: they have delegated discretion. Therefore, the politician can’t change his or her mind about policy without changing the law. This is exactly how independent central banks are set up, and the general arguments for choosing between day-to-day political control or delegation have been formalised by economists such as Alberto Alesina and Guido Tabellini. Majone brought those arguments into broader political science debates, and without the algebra. What is more, Majone’s writings explicitly connect these choices to questions of legitimacy. He does not get into that deeply, but crucially does ask under what circumstances this type of fiduciary delegation can be legitimate. He answers that we should (or may) delegate to trustee-type agencies the pursuit of economic efficiency (making the cake bigger), but we shouldn’t delegate distributional issues (how the cake should be shared). I broadly agree with that, but he doesn’t say very much about how you do it. And he assumes that the dividing line is clean, but it’s not. So far I’ve picked books by three political scientists: one of them, Landis, celebrating the administrative state, one of them, Lowi, attacking it (and in particular vague delegations), and the third, Majone, slightly more nuanced, distinguishing different types of delegation. If we follow Majone, you want some parts of the administrative state close to day-to-day politics but others at a distance. Suddenly, we’re confronting deeper questions. What do we want our politicians to do on our behalf when they structure the administrative state? How should they decide where to draw the lines—and on their own ongoing role—so as to maintain the legitimacy of the system of government? At this point, we have to move away from political science and turn to political theorists."