Delegation, Detail and Discretion: Bureaucrats and the Construction of Policies.

Contemporary studies of delegation tend to focus on the discretion that law-makers give to administrators when applying regulations or delivering services. One almost entirely unexplored aspect of delegation is that which occurs when administrative officials are given the task of developing policies in the first place. Politicians frequently have only very sketchy ideas of what is needed to put together a "policy" - for example what mix of laws, regulations, internal guidance, financial arrangements and guidelines have to be finalised before sets of measures can be presented to the legislature and/or a wider public. They delegate crucial aspects of this work to bureaucrats. How this delegation is managed, the kind of discretion that dealing with "detail" brings and the wider implications of this form of bureaucratic involvement in policy making for our understanding of the policy process in general and theories of delegation in particular are explored using evidence from the United Kingdom and Sweden. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]