Choosing Not To Choose: When Politicians Choose To Delegate Powers.

The present paper belongs to the rather young research program of positive constitutional economics, which is interested in explaining the emergence of particular institutions and organizations and their change over time. Politicians' decisions to delegate power domestically or internationally are made within the framework of an existing constitution. In that sense, our focus is on post-constitutional choice. Yet, by establishing new organizations, either domestically or internationally, politicians create new institutions that might themselves become influential in interpreting the constitution. In that sense, the decision to create a new agency can be viewed also as a decision to modify an existing constitutional order. It seems, therefore, adequate to describe the scope of this paper as the analysis of post-constitutional constitutional choice. Most of the hypotheses to be generated take an (exogenously given) constitutional structure as independent variable, which can be used to explain both the extent and kind of (domestic or international) delegation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]