SemOpenAlex |

SemOpenAlex

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W4366998737> ?p ?o ?g. }

Showing items 1 to 87 of 87 with 100 items per page.

W4366998737 abstract "Regulatory discretion is a central theme in the study of regulation and governance. However, little attention has been paid to the question of how countries vary in the way they design regulatory discretion. This article fills this gap by conceptualizing styles of regulatory discretion according to a novel conceptual framework that distinguishes between three dimensions of regulatory discretion: obligation, content, and procedure. Empirically, the article compares regulatory discretion in British and Israeli education legislation during the period 1948–2020. The findings reveal substantial differences in regulatory discretion styles between the two countries across all three dimensions of regulatory discretion. Accordingly, this article proposes several links between regulatory discretion and regulatory production that can be explored further. In doing this, the article points to the relationship between discretion practices and regulatory outcomes. שיקול דעת רגולטורי הוא נושא מרכזי בחקר הרגולציה והממשליות. יחד עם זאת, תשומת לב מועטה מאוד הוקדשה לשאלה אודות האופן השונה שבו מדינות מעצבות שיקול דעת רגולטורי. מאמר זה מגשר על פער מחקרי זה באמצעות המשגה של סגנונות של שיקול דעת רגולטורי הנשענת על תשתית מושגית המבחינה בין שלושה מימדים של שיקול דעת רגולטורי: חובה (obligation), תוכן (content) ופרוצדורה (procedure). מבחינה אמפירית, המאמר משווה בין שיקול הדעת הרגולטורי בחקיקת החינוך בריטניה ובישראל בשנים 1948–2020. ממצאי המחקר חושפים כי קיימים הבדלים משמעותיים בין שתי המדינות בסגנונות שיקול הדעת הרגולטורי המשתרעים על פני שלושת המימדים הנזכרים. בהתאם לכך, המאמר מעלה השערות הנוגעות לקשר שבין שיקול דעת רגולטורי ותפוקה רגולטורית, השערות שיש לבוחנן במחקרי המשך, ומצביע על קשר אפשרי בין פרקטיקות של שיקול דעת לבין תוצאות רגולטוריות. During the past several decades, the growth of regulation has been accompanied by a massive transfer of regulatory powers from the legislative branch to the executive branch, through the process of delegation. Nevertheless, scholarly attention to regulation and delegation has largely focused on the delegation of regulatory powers to independent agencies, overlooking the manner in which delegations are granted to make secondary or delegated legislation. In recent decades, legislatures have delegated considerable rulemaking authorities to bureaucratic bodies (Carelli & Pierre, 2023; Coglianese, 2019), when designing and forming their discretion to draw up bureaucratic legislation (Levi-Faur, 2011). While legislatures delegate powers differently (Huber & Shipan, 2002; Page, 2016; Pünder, 2009), so far, only limited research has been carried out to determine how they design their discretion to make regulation, and what the possible effects of such designs are on regulatory production. Regulatory discretion reflects the capability of governments to interpret and apply laws through regulation. It is defined as the transfer of regulatory powers from the legislature to the executive branch in a way that shapes the ability of the executive to make regulations freely or restrictedly (Kosti, 2023a). Regulatory discretion determines the opportunities and constraints for those actors who make regulations during the formulation and implementation processes. Therefore, through a better understanding of regulatory discretion, we can better understand why countries differ in the amount of regulation they make (Kosti & Levi-Faur, 2019). The main goal of this article is to conceptualize the styles of regulatory discretion and to theorize on their possible effects on regulation-making. To do this, this article identifies four styles of discretion based on the literature and employs text analysis to examine dimensions of regulatory discretion in British and Israeli legislative texts between 1948 and 2020. It also discusses the possible links of the styles with regulatory production. A most-similar-case design is used because the United Kingdom (UK) and Israel have shared many characteristics of education reforms in recent decades, although they differ greatly in terms of how these reforms were implemented (Gibton, 2013). More specifically, while education regulations in the UK are high on the regulatory agenda, (Bevan, 2015; Page, 2001), they are negligible in Israel (Hoffman & Baron, 2020; Kosti & Levi-Faur, 2020). The article asks three research questions: First, how do regulatory discretion styles diverge? Second, how has regulatory discretion been designed in British and Israeli education legislation between 1948 and 2020? Third, in what ways can the differences in regulatory discretion styles among British and Israeli legislation affect their divergent approaches to regulation? In order to answer these questions, the study uses a novel framework that analyzes regulatory discretion according to three dimensions: obligation, content, and procedure (Kosti, 2023a). Each dimension highlights a key element of regulatory discretion: the choice or duty to make regulations (i.e., obligation); the freedom to determine the details of regulations (i.e., content), and the control of the regulatory process in relation to veto players (i.e., procedure). Based on this framework, and following the literature on bureaucratic discretion, the article theoretically characterizes styles of regulatory discretion based on two axes. The first axis refers to the first dimension of regulatory discretion, obligation, in accordance with studies that observe permissive delegation as a proxy for discretion, and mandatory delegation as a proxy for lack of discretion (Vakilifathi, 2019; Yackee & Yackee, 2016). The second axis refers to the distinction and substitutive roles of ex-ante and ex-post control mechanisms on discretion (Huber & Shipan, 2002), based on the distinction between the second and third dimension of regulatory discretion, content and procedure, respectively. The findings show that the UK is more inclined to delegate regulatory powers than Israel, but unlike Israel—where mandatory delegation has been used frequently—permissive delegation is more common in the UK. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that Israel has a preference for procedural controls over regulatory discretion, while the UK has a preference for content controls. More specifically, legislation in the UK includes content provisions that direct, organize, and formalize regulatory discretion. Conversely, Israel rarely includes content provisions, and instead, it grants veto powers to executive and parliamentary actors. This study suggests that different styles of regulatory discretion may lead to different regulatory outcomes. More specifically, it suggests that the design of regulatory discretion can affect regulatory production. This might be true for the distinction between permissive and mandatory delegations; for the distinction between ex-ante and ex-post control mechanisms; for the effects of vetoes, as well as for the use of different types of content provisions. In making these suggestions, the article paves the way for future research in this area. The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the concept of regulatory discretion according its three dimensions: obligation, content, and procedure, and it identifies four styles of regulatory discretion. Section 3 presents the research design, including case selection, data collection, and text analysis. Section 4 presents the empirical findings, first by each dimension of regulatory discretion in turn, and then with the dimensions combined. Section 5 discusses the findings and proposes several effects of regulatory discretion styles on regulatory production. Section 6 concludes the article. Regulatory discretion is central to the understanding of regulation. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of research on regulatory discretion and how countries differ in their approach to it. One of the reasons for this knowledge gap is the lack of an agreed definition of regulation (Koop & Lodge, 2017), as well as the controversy concerning the politics of regulation and delegation (Benoît, 2021), especially among “Europeanists” and “Americanists” (Pollack, 2002). “Europeanists” usually associate discretion with independence. They focus on the delegation of regulatory authority to independent regulatory agencies (Gilardi, 2008; Hansen, 2023; Maggetti, 2007, 2012; Maggetti et al., 2022; Thatcher, 2002; Thatcher & Sweet, 2002), despite the fact that they normally lack the authority to make regulations through delegated legislation. In European studies on regulatory discretion, the focus has primarily been on how regulators exercise discretion when overseeing markets (Mantzari & Vantaggiato, 2020), or the focus has been on discretion in a regulatory capitalism context (Schmidt & Scott 2021). In contrast, “Americanists” pay considerable attention to how Congress delegates and controls rulemaking powers of regulatory agencies (Yackee & Yackee, 2016). However, they do not refer specifically to regulatory activities or regulatory discretion, but rather view rulemaking powers as part of a bureaucratic, administrative, or executive discretion (Balla, 2015; Epstein & O'Halloran, 1994, 1996, 1999; Huber et al., 2001; Huber & Shipan, 2002; Moe, 1989; Vakilifathi, 2019; Vannoni et al., 2021; Young & Tanner, 2023). This article bridges the lack of agreed definitions of delegation and regulation between “Europeanists” and “Americanists”. It relies on the idea that the powers to make regulations in most countries are not inherent but are delegated by legislatures (Page, 2016; Pünder, 2009), and it highlights two major points that may foster comparative research. First, it understands regulation as a form of bureaucratic legislation—that is, delegated legislation (Kosti et al., 2019a, 2019b; Kosti & Levi-Faur, 2019). In this regard, the actors in European countries with the powers to make regulations in the form of delegated legislation are often cabinet ministers (Bevan 2015, 2021; Page 2001, 2012), rather than the independent regulatory agencies in the US (Yackee & Yackee, 2012, 2016). Second, it emphasizes the importance of focusing on the nature of delegated powers (Coglianese & Yoo, 2016), and recognizes the necessity of focusing only on the delegation of regulatory powers. These assumptions are expressed in the conceptualization of regulatory discretion as three dimensions: obligation, content, and procedure (Kosti, 2023a). Obligation refers to the distinction between the duty or choice to make regulation. Content refers to the number and type of instructions guiding the regulatory content. Procedure focuses on the regulatory process, and specifically on the existence of veto players in the regulatory process. The following subsections provide more in-depth information about each of the dimensions of regulatory discretion. The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision about the information which must be contained in an institution's entry in the register. (1) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision requiring: (a) relationships education to be provided to pupils of compulsory school age receiving primary education at schools in England; (b) relationships and sex education to be provided (instead of sex education) to pupils receiving secondary education at schools in England. While permissive and mandatory delegation provides details about whether executive actors are required or allowed to issue regulations, they do not refer to the content of the regulations. Laws often define the “types of actions or behavior that may, must, or must not occur by particular groups or individuals in government and society” (Huber & Shipan, 2002, p. 1). Content provisions in this regard include details about what regulations may, must or must not do. If a delegation provides no such information, executive actors can interpret delegations broadly. Conversely, the greater the number of such provisions, and the more binding they are, the closer that agents would have to stick to legislature instructions and rules that guide the content of regulations (Vannoni et al., 2021). (2) The regulations must include provision: (a) requiring the Secretary of State to give guidance to proprietors of schools in relation to the provision of the education and to review the guidance from time to time; (b) requiring proprietors of schools to have regard to the guidance; (c) requiring proprietors of schools to make statements of policy in relation to the Education to be provided, and to make the statements available to parents or other persons; (d) about the circumstances in which a pupil (or a pupil below a specified age) is to be excused from receiving relationships and sex education or specified elements of that education. (5) Regulations under this section shall not require information as to the results of an individual pupil's assessment (whether under this Chapter or otherwise) to be made available to any persons other than— (a) the parents of the pupil concerned; (b) the governing body of the school; or (c) the local education authority; and shall not require such information to be made available to the governing body or the local education authority except where relevant for the purposes of the performance by that body or authority of any of their functions. (6) The regulations may amend any provision (including provision conferring powers) that is made by or under— (a) Section 342 of the Education Act 1996; (b) Chapter 4 of Part 5 of the Education Act 1996; (c) Schedule 1 to the Education Act 1996; (d) Part 6 of the Education Act 2002; (e) Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Education and Skills Act 2008; (f)the Academies Act 2010. An analysis of regulatory discretion is not complete without examining the procedures around delegation (Balla, 2015; Epstein & O'Halloran, 1996, 1999; McCubbins et al., 1987; Moe, 1989). In this regard, the regulatory process is an important arena for constraining discretion. More specifically, the existence of legislative and executive veto players may affect the bureaucracies' capacity to make regulations and to determine their content (Kosti, 2021). These actors—the veto players—can turn the regulatory process into a bargaining environment (Huber & Shipan, 2002), because they have the ability to influence implementation through the threat to vote down regulations. While such procedures are sometimes understood as a means to make the regulatory process more democratic (Pünder, 2009; Rose-Ackerman, 2019), they may also make the regulatory process more burdensome. “Executive consent” refers to cases where executive actors with regulatory powers must obtain the consent of other executive actors before signing a regulation. Similarly, “parliamentary approval” requires the consent of a chamber or a parliamentary committee before a regulation is made. Executive consent is more common under parliamentary regimes, especially those of proportional representation elections (Thies, 2001). Such systems often result in the fragmentation of the party system and multiparty coalitions, and executive consent is perceived as an “institutional check” (Thies, 2001) to maintain control over ministers from other coalition parties. In Israel, for example, the Ministry of Finance has become a powerful veto actor of other ministers' regulation-making authorities (Kosti, 2021). Similar procedures also exist in the UK (The National Archives, 2017, p. 4). Just as executive consent is understood as an institutional check, parliamentary approval allows legislative committees (Kim & Loewenberg, 2005; Martin & Vanberg, 2004; Thies, 2001), as well as other house chambers managed by MPs from different parties, to approve regulations before they are made. Although consultation with either parliamentary or executive actors is sometimes required (Huber & Shipan, 2002), approval and consent may have a greater impact on regulatory discretion. Regulatory discretion styles are central to understanding regulation, because they demonstrate the type, nature, and severity of constraints on regulation-making. It is important to understand how delegation and discretion are designed, because they can have an impact on how, and whether, policies are implemented (Yackee & Yackee, 2016). This section identifies four styles of regulatory discretion, based on the distinction between the first dimension of regulatory discretion, obligation, and the second and third dimensions of regulatory discretion, content and procedure (Table 1). These configurations of regulatory discretion reflect the main mechanisms for controlling regulation-making. The first dimension of regulatory discretion, obligation, differs from the other two dimensions, content and procedure, as it focuses on the timing and the choice of regulation-making and has nothing to do with affecting their details. Delegation studies make the distinction between mandatory and permissive delegation as an indication of discretion, and they associate permissive delegation with discretion and mandatory delegation with the lack of discretion (Vakilifathi, 2019; Yackee & Yackee, 2016). However, legislatures that command delegated actors to regulate (i.e., mandatory delegation) restrict these actors' choice to decide whether, and when, to make a regulation (i.e., permissive delegation) without a further effect of what the regulations would include. However, the second and third dimension of regulatory discretion—content and procedure—can be seen, respectively, not only as ex-ante and ex-post control mechanisms over discretion, but also as substitutive strategies (Epstein & O'Halloran, 1994; Ethridge, 1981; Huber & Shipan, 2002, 2011; Martin, 1997; Vannoni et al., 2021). When legislatures can rely on vetoes, they are less likely to include the more “costly” guidelines and instructions in the legislative language that may limit discretion. However, some scholars argue ex-ante mechanisms are more effective than ex-post mechanisms in constraining discretion (Huber & Shipan, 2002). The four styles of regulatory discretion presented in Table 1 differ on two axes: obligation (i.e., whether a delegation is mandatory or permissive) and mechanism of control (i.e., whether a delegation is constrained either by an ex-ante mechanism—content—or an ex-post mechanism—procedure). “Guided discretion” refers to a situation in which a permissive delegation is accompanied by content provisions. The latter can be affected by guidelines that may be more binding (when the provisions are mandatory or constraining) or softer (when the provisions are permissive). In this style of regulatory discretion, the choice of whether to make a regulation depends on the executive branch's will, and the content of regulation is guided by the legislature's use of content provisions. In contrast, in “instructed discretion”, a mandatory delegation is followed by content provisions. The term “instructed” here reflects the closer role taken by the legislature in managing regulation-making. In this case, a legislature uses mandatory delegation to force the executive to make regulations, although the details themselves are determined in accordance with the content provisions included in the law. Moving to the other two types of regulatory discretion—“bargained discretion” and “supervised discretion”—the former indicates instances in which the executive branch has the choice of whether to make regulations (i.e., permissive delegation), but it is not constrained by an ex-ante mechanism (i.e., content) but rather by an ex-post mechanism (i.e., procedure). In this case, the regulatory process becomes a bargaining arena where the approval of a regulation is required before the regulation is made. Agreements between the delegatee and other parties result in a regulation, thereby limiting the discretion of the delegatee. “Supervised discretion” reflects a more rigid control over discretion, in which a delegation is controlled both by mandatory delegation and by ex-post mechanisms. A discretion is limited here, both by the decision to make a regulation and by the need to obtain the consent of other actors. It is important to note that regulatory discretion styles are not limited to these four categories—guided discretion, instructed discretion, bargained discretion, and supervised discretion. When delegations are neither constrained by ex-ante mechanisms nor by ex-post mechanisms, they constitute a relatively non-restrictive style of discretion. These four styles, however, allow a glimpse of the main configurations of controlling regulatory discretion, in line with the literature. This article compares regulatory discretion in British and Israeli education legislation between 1948 and 2020. This approach—a one-sector, two-nation design—for increasing cases is among the most straightforward for scholars of regulatory governance (Levi-Faur, 2006), and in this research, it builds on a most-similar-case design as an exploratory technique for cases that “exhibit strong similarities on background conditions (Z) but divergent outcomes (Y)” (Gerring & Cojocaru, 2016, p. 399). More specifically, it aims to generate new hypotheses (Lijphart, 1971) regarding the nature of regulatory discretion (cause) and its effect on regulatory production (outcome). In terms of case selection, it is possible to note the similarity at both the country level and the sector level. At the country level, the UK and Israel follow the Westminster model. They both have a flexible unwritten rather than codified constitution (Likhovski, 1971; Wolf-Phillips, 1973), and a similar “fusion of powers” in which the executive emerges from, and is responsible to, the legislature (Hazan, 1997). In addition, Israel has followed the British model for its administrative and legal system (Diver, 1997), it shares a similar tradition of the legislative process, and has, similar to the UK, a professional and departmental public service (Galnoor, 2010).1 In terms of sector selection, the British and Israeli education sectors stood out for two main reasons. First, there is a strong centralized educational policy in both countries, which is carried out by strong centralized ministries of education. Both countries have undergone extensive decentralization in recent decades, partly as a result of government initiatives (Gibton & Goldring, 2001). Second, the focus on education allows an equivalent comparison between the UK and Israel, as education is not part of the EU common policies. Despite these similarities at the country and sector levels, the production of education regulation differed sharply between the countries. In the UK, education has been one of the most prominent policy areas in the British Gazette since the 1980s (Bevan, 2015; Page, 2001). For instance, Page (2001) found that the greatest number of statutory instruments between 1987 and 1997 were concerned with education. In Israel, however, education finds little expression in regulation, and an increasing expression in non-legal means (Kosti & Levi-Faur, 2020). In fact, the Israeli education system is de facto run by CEO circulars (Hoffman & Baron, 2020). It should be noted, however, that the choice of education regulation may limit the generalization of findings to all policy areas. However, it does allow theorizing about how regulatory discretion styles might impact regulatory outcomes. Data for both countries in this study are based on legislation datasets between 1948 and 2020.2 The texts of British legislation were derived from two sources: the legislative text for 1948–2015 was derived from Matthew Williams' dataset of British legislation for the period 1900–2015 (Williams, 2018), and the legislative text for 2016–2020 was web-scraped from legislation.gov.uk, the official website for UK legislation. The data include both new legislation and amendments to existing legislation.3 Education laws were filtered using the British Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), which coded British legislation for the period 1911–2015 into policy areas (John et al., 2013).4 Education laws between 2016 and 2020 were manually added according to the CAP codebook (Bevan, 2019). The total number of laws in the British dataset is 90 laws,5 including 4,214 sections and 1,059,002 words. The Israeli dataset is based on the Knesset's National Legislation Database.6 The classification of laws into policy areas was carried out in previous research according to the coding book of CAP (Kosti et al., 2019a, 2019b; Kosti & Levi-Faur, 2019). The data contain 165 education laws made between 1948 and 2020. These laws include new legislation and mostly direct amendments.7 The number of sections in the dataset is 871, and the total number of words is 36,361. This study combines computational methods for text analysis and manual methods for content analysis. Since the amount of data for the UK is significantly larger than for Israel, “synthetic dependency parsing” was used to detect delegations, content provisions, and procedure for UK education legislation. Synthetic dependency parsing is a method that follows the lexical and semantic relations between words in a sentence to compare grammar patterns of desired information. Unlike the mainstream approach to political text analysis—the “bag-of-words” approach—this method uses the rich information of grammatical structures that connect words to capture texts elements (Vannoni et al., 2021). Using combinations of words and parts of speech, it allows the legislative language to be matched against patterns of sentences and the desired information to be extracted (for more information, see Kosti, 2023a). The output of this analysis is a dataset containing the sentences identified by the different dimensions of regulatory discretion: obligation (mandatory delegation, permissive delegation); content (mandatory provisions, permissive provisions, constraining provisions), and procedure (executive consent, parliamentary approval). As the automatic identification of the following dimensions did not link delegations, content provision, and procedure, this was done manually. In addition, where errors were found, they were manually corrected. Table 2 provides examples of the different dimensions identified in the analysis. For Israel, identifying and analyzing delegations, content provisions, and procedures was done manually by reading education laws and looking for various keywords related to the delegation of regulatory powers, including the nouns “regulations” (takanot), “orders” (tsavim), “minister” (sar), and verbs such as “determined” (kava) and “will determine” (y'ikbah). Under each delegation, it was examined whether each term was accompanied by various content provisions and whether regulations required the approval or consent of executive or parliamentary actors. The first dimension of regulatory discretion—obligation—is measured by the type of delegation. According to the findings, the UK and Israel differ in two important ways. A majority of delegations in the UK (94.87%) are permissive (Table 3), which means that the executive branch decides whether to make a regulation. Delegations in Israel, however, tend to be mandatory rather than permissive. Education regulatory actors in Israel are less able than their counterparts in the UK to decide whether to issue regulations. The data from Israel show that 61.22% of all delegations are mandatory, and 38.78% are permissive. Second, the UK has delegated almost three times as many regulatory powers than Israel. The number of regulatory powers delegated in education legislation in the UK is 702, compared with 245 delegations in education legislation in Israel. However, the numerical difference should be carefully examined, since the scope of the delegations across and within the two countries were not examined.8 At the same time, the significant differences between the UK and Israel in numbers still indicate differences between the countries of the amount of power conferred. While there have been relatively more delegating powers in both countries since the 1980s and early 1990s, the data are volatile, indicating the patterns of lawmaking in education rather than a clear trend over the years. All in all, Israel has fewer delegations than the UK, but they are mostly mandatory, which limits the discretion to decide whether and when to make regulations. Since delegation by itself does not provide a complete picture of discretion, the second dimension of regulatory discretion—content—focuses on provisions that dictate what regulations may, must and must not include in their content. There are three types of content provision: permissive, mandatory, and constraining. These three categories differ in the degree of discretion they confer on the regulatory powers. Again, the findings indicate striking differences between the UK and Israel: while the UK uses content provisions extensively (491 provisions in total), Israel rarely includes them (five provisions in total). As shown in Table 4, exactly one third (33.33%) of all delegations in the UK had at least one permissive provision. In addition, 63 delegations were followed by at least one mandatory provision (8.97%), and seven delegations (0.85%) were constrained by a constraining provision. In some cases, delegations were constrained by more than one type of provision. As noted, regulatory content in the UK has been more instructed than in Israel. However, the British case suggests a preference for permissive provisions rather than mandatory or constraining provisions, thus allowing more freedom to determine the content of the regulations. In Israel, however, due to the absence of any provisions, the content of regulation can be interpreted in a broad sense. The third dimension of regulatory discretion—procedure—refers to whether executive actors with regulatory powers dominate the regulatory process or whether they negotiate with other actors over regulation-making. In Israel, when delegations are constrained, both types of procedure were evident. For instance, as shown in Table 5, 56 of the 245 delegations required parliamentary approval (22.86%), and 45 delegations were subject to executive consent (18.37% of all delegations). Some delegations were subject to more than one procedure, and others required the approval or consent of more than one actor. However, more than 40% of all delegations were subject to these procedures. Who are the players with the greatest veto power in the field of education in Israel? Among the parliamentary veto players, the Knesset Education Committee has emerged as a dominant veto player, whereas among executive actors, the minister of finance and the minister of health were the leading veto actors. In the UK, 43 delegations (6.13% of all delegations) required parliamentary approval (affirmative procedure),9 while 14 required executive consent (1.99% of all delegations) (Table 5). This means that less than a marginal percentage of all delegations was subject to any type of procedural veto. Interestingly, the use of government actors to veto has diminished over the years, while Parliament itself has increasingly engaged in a veto role. Comparing regulatory discretion in the education legislation of the two countries, according to the four different styles of regulatory discretion, reveals substantially different results (Table 6). One similarity exists between the two countries: neither ex-ante nor ex-post control mechanisms were applied to most delegations in either country. However, when distinguishing between the different styles, there is a noticeable tendency in the UK towards guided discretion (34.61% of all delegations), with smaller minorities of delegations belonging to bargained discretion (7.83% of all delegations), instructed discretion (2.28% of all delegations), and supervised discretion (0.14% of all delegations). In contrast, the most prominent styles in Israel are supervised discretion (24.49% of all delegations) and bargained discretion (13.06% of all delegations). Instructed discretion (1.63% of all delegations) and guided discretion (0.41% of all delegations) were barely noticeable. Section 5 explores how regulatory discretion styles affect regulatory production. So far, the literature has rarely addressed this central question (Yackee & Yackee, 2016), therefore, based on the cases studied, this section proposes possible explanations for how regulatory discretion styles may affect regulatory production. As already mentioned, in recent decades the UK has relied heavily on regulation, while Israel has not. Despite the similarities that the two countries have in their educational policies, British and Israeli education regulatory discretion differ fundamentally, as illustrated in the previous section. As for obligation, permissive delegations dominated in the UK, while mandatory delegations prevailed slightly more than permissive delegations in Israel. Moreover, the two countries differ greatly in their reliance on regulatory discretion's content and procedure dimensions. Regulatory discretion has been mostly controlled by permissive content provisions in the UK, while legislative approval and executive consent have been used more extensively in Israel. In this regard, the British and Israeli cases provide fruitful ground for exploring the potential effects of regulatory discretion on regulatory production. As part of this section, hypotheses will be proposed regarding the distinction between permissive and mandatory delegations; the difference between ex-ante and ex-post control mechanisms; the effects of vetoes, and the use of different types of content provisions. One possible explanation for the differences between the British and Israeli production of education regulations—which reflect a possible effect of discretion on regulatory production—is derived from the British reliance on permissive delegations and the mixed use of permissive and mandatory delegations in Israel. While the literature suggests that mandatory delegations are more likely to result in regulations than permissive delegations (Yackee & Yackee, 2016), it can be assumed that the number of regulations yielded by mandatory delegations is lower than the number yielded by permissive delegations. In this sense, permissive delegations allow the bureaucracy more independence and more freedom to implement regulation. However, even in countries that use mandatory delegations, many of them are not implemented (Yackee & Yackee, 2016). One possible reason for the limited use of education regulations in Israel is the use of vetoes. Even if mandatory delegations are more likely to result in regulations, the constraint of these delegations by veto might largely affect the likelihood of the regulations eventually being implemented. In this regard, the findings point to the fact that a large proportion of mandatory delegations in Israeli education legislation were subjected to veto control. In addition, the identity of the veto actors should also be considered. When these actors are from different parties, a veto is more likely to be imposed (Martin, 1997; Tsebelis, 1999). This may explain why veto powers in Israel's multiparty coalition environment are more likely to be used than in the UK's single-party majority governments. A bureaucrat can comply with the need to write a report or to consult particular groups or to conclude his or her work in a specified time period without being sharply constrained with respect to the policy actually implemented. But if the statute says to do X, the bureaucrat cannot do Y. Regulatory discretion is a key component in regulatory studies. Nevertheless, only a few studies have been conducted on it, and particularly on how and why countries differ in the way they design regulatory discretion. This article characterized styles of regulatory discretion and—based on an empirical analysis that compared regulatory discretion in British and Israeli education legislation over more than 70 years—proposed several potential effects of regulatory discretion on regulatory production. In proposing these effects, the article improves our theoretical understanding of discretion practices and their potential impact on regulatory outcomes. The article addressed three research questions. First, are there different styles of regulatory discretion, and how do they differ? As a response to this question, the article identified four styles of regulatory discretion: guided discretion, instructed discretion, bargained discretion, and supervised discretion. This classification was based on a novel framework that analyzes regulatory discretion according to three dimensions: obligation, content, and procedure. Regulatory discretion styles were identified according to two central discussions in the literature on discretion. The first axis focused on whether a delegation is mandatory or permissive (i.e., obligation). The second axis focused on whether a control mechanism was imposed ex-ante (i.e., content) or ex-post (i.e., procedure). It was argued that these styles of regulatory discretion are not the only ones, but that they comprise the most central forms of controlling regulatory discretion. The second question the article asked: How was regulatory discretion designed in British and Israeli education legislation between 1948 and 2020? Using automated and manual textual analysis of the three dimensions of regulatory discretion, the findings identified three primary differences in regulatory discretion between the two countries. First, the UK has delegated a greater number of delegations than Israel, and it has relied particularly on permissive delegations, whereas Israel has relied on mandatory delegations. In addition, delegations were constrained in the UK by permissive content provisions that outlined what regulations may do. Contrary to this, Israel has rarely employed content provisions as a means of restricting regulatory discretion. Rather, Israel has restricted delegations through procedures, and has allowed parliamentary and governmental actors to veto regulations. This is in contrast to the UK, which rarely uses such procedures. The third research question was: In what ways may the styles of regulatory discretion in British and Israeli education legislation affect their divergent tendencies to use regulations? In the UK, education regulation has been one of the most prominent policy areas on the British regulatory agenda since the 1980s (Bevan 2015; Page, 2001). In Israel, however, the production of education regulation was negligible. The analysis explored how regulatory discretion may drive regulatory production, and it proposed several hypotheses in this regard. These hypotheses included the existence and absence of ex-ante and ex-post control mechanisms; the differences between mandatory and permissive delegations; the different effects of ex-ante and ex-post mechanisms on regulatory production, and the identity of veto players as part of the impact of ex-post mechanisms on regulatory production. In terms of the generalizability of the findings, future studies should examine how typical the case of education legislation is in both the UK and Israel. Nevertheless, an in-depth analysis of British delegations, as well as some anecdotal examples from Israel, hint that the variation in regulatory discretion styles in education might be similar to those in other policy areas level. A recent study that had analyzed the entire British legislation of 120 years found that a combination of permissive delegation and permissive content provisions was remarkably common (Kosti, 2023a). Israeli delegations have not been systematically analyzed in the same way, but in recent years there has been a lively discussion about mandatory delegations that have not been implemented, as well as the use of executive consent. This can be interpreted in two ways. First, the use of mandatory regulations is not uncommon in Israel. Second, following a 2017 cabinet decision—which encouraged the mechanism of consultation rather than consent—it appears that the use of consent has become a frequent control mechanism for secondary legislation (Prime Minister's Office, 2017). A recent study of Israeli “arrangements” laws has also confirmed this (Kosti, 2021). Future investigations should also systematically examine the hypotheses proposed in this article. This type of research should start by collecting a dataset of delegations, characterizing them, connecting them to regulations, and then determining which delegations eventually resulted in regulations. Future research could also be conducted on the content of regulations. Specifically, it might be possible to observe whether different styles of discretion affect different policy designs in regulations. The hypotheses proposed here could be investigated in additional countries or for different issue areas. An earlier draft was presented at the 7th Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments. I would like to thank the participants of the conference, the editors of Public Administration and the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Cary Coglianese, David Levi-Faur, Hanan Haber, and Nadiv Mordechay for providing useful comments on previous drafts. This research was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation grant 270/2021. The authors declare no conflict of interest. The peer review history for this article is available at https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1111/padm.12929. This article has earned an Open Data badge for making publicly available the digitally-shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at [[insert provided URL from Open Research Disclosure Form]]. Kosti, Nir, 2023, Replication data for: Styles of Regulatory Discretion: A Comparative Analysis of the British and Israeli Education Legislation, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/1N7KLQ, Harvard Dataverse, V1" @default.
W4366998737 created "2023-04-27" @default.
W4366998737 creator A5045195548 @default.
W4366998737 date "2023-04-25" @default.
W4366998737 modified "2023-10-09" @default.
W4366998737 title "Styles of regulatory discretion: A comparative analysis of the British and Israeli education legislation" @default.
W4366998737 cites W1482215900 @default.
W4366998737 cites W1488184033 @default.
W4366998737 cites W154569795 @default.
W4366998737 cites W188555833 @default.
W4366998737 cites W1966358148 @default.
W4366998737 cites W1974073228 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2035088645 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2037888152 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2064852520 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2077556346 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2079352375 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2092265244 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2099470489 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2123858578 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2125536012 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2149607317 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2153808509 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2231759834 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2282217865 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2325591951 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2328083719 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2328190647 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2344106986 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2588804656 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2746262272 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2923208568 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2924168595 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2978782504 @default.
W4366998737 cites W2985130172 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3010869202 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3088923750 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3097884385 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3122965367 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3123631154 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3134020730 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3144252012 @default.
W4366998737 cites W3167145415 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4213439217 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4232627685 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4232663284 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4235103359 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4237821466 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4245939498 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4252938709 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4280636993 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4312099025 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4313410271 @default.
W4366998737 cites W4323854425 @default.
W4366998737 doi "https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12929" @default.
W4366998737 hasPublicationYear "2023" @default.
W4366998737 type Work @default.
W4366998737 citedByCount "0" @default.
W4366998737 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
W4366998737 hasAuthorship W4366998737A5045195548 @default.
W4366998737 hasBestOaLocation W43669987371 @default.
W4366998737 hasConcept C17744445 @default.
W4366998737 hasConcept C199539241 @default.
W4366998737 hasConcept C2777351106 @default.
W4366998737 hasConcept C2777632292 @default.
W4366998737 hasConcept C3116431 @default.
W4366998737 hasConceptScore W4366998737C17744445 @default.
W4366998737 hasConceptScore W4366998737C199539241 @default.
W4366998737 hasConceptScore W4366998737C2777351106 @default.
W4366998737 hasConceptScore W4366998737C2777632292 @default.
W4366998737 hasConceptScore W4366998737C3116431 @default.
W4366998737 hasLocation W43669987371 @default.
W4366998737 hasOpenAccess W4366998737 @default.
W4366998737 hasPrimaryLocation W43669987371 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W1497194031 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W1530408697 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W1986865610 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W2020096343 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W2123968322 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W2351570161 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W2360766069 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W2374874027 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W2435376420 @default.
W4366998737 hasRelatedWork W2495786046 @default.
W4366998737 isParatext "false" @default.
W4366998737 isRetracted "false" @default.
W4366998737 workType "article" @default.