Edward Stiglitz

Cornell University | CU · Cornell Law School

Regulatory bundling consists of the ability of administrative agencies to aggregate and disaggregate rules. Agencies, in other words, can bundle what would otherwise be multiple rules into just one. Conversely, they can split one rule into several. This observation parallels other recent work on how agencies can aggregate adjudications and enforcem...

The nondelegation doctrine has been fought over for decades, yet scholars have not examined a foundational question: Can judicial doctrine materially shape legislative drafting practices Even if a strong nondelegation doctrine provides legislators an incentive to draft narrow statutes, they would have many reasons to persist in broad delegations, a...

8 Journal of Legal Analysis 95-119 (2016)Executive discretion over policy outcomes is an inevitable feature of our political system. However, in recent years, the President has sought to expand his discretion through a variety of controversial and legally questionable tactics. Through a series of simple separation of powers models, we study one suc...

Presidents often attach statements to the bills they sign into law, purporting to celebrate, construe, or object to provisions in the statute. Though long a feature of U.S. lawmaking, the President has avowedly attempted to use these signing statements as tool of strategic influence over judicial decisionmaking since the 1980s — as a way of creatin...

Presidents often attach statements to the bills they sign into law, purporting to celebrate, construe, or object to provisions in the statute. Though long a feature of U.S. lawmaking, the President has avowedly attempted to use these signing statements as tool of strategic influence over judicial decision making since the 1980s — as a way of creati...

Congressional enactments and executive orders instruct agencies to publish their anticipated rules in what is known as the Unified Agenda. The Agenda's stated purpose is to ensure that political actors can monitor regulatory development. Agencies have come under fire in recent years, however, for conspicuous omissions and irregularities. Critics al...

Executive discretion over policy outcomes is an inevitable feature of our political system. However, in recent years, the President has sought to expand his discretion using a variety of controversial and legally questionable tactics. Through a series of simple separation of powers models, we study one such tactic, employed by both Democratic and R...

This paper examines to what extent agency rulemaking is democratic. It reviews theories of administrative rulemaking in light of two normative benchmarks: a “democratic” benchmark based on voter preferences, and a “republican” benchmark based on the preferences of elected representatives. It then evaluates how the empirical evidence lines up in lig...

An important trend in administrative and constitutional law is to attempt to concentrate ever-greater control over the administrative state in the hands of the President. As the Supreme Court recently reminded us in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, one foundation for this doctrinal trend is a fear that diffusing po...

Scholars have advanced a wide range of theories regarding the role of Senate confirmation in judicial appointments. In this article, I directly test the predictions of these models using a novel measure of the ideology of judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. The main results indicate that the filibuster and majority party have predominated in appo...

This book presents a new theory of party identification, the central concept in the study of voting. Challenging the traditional idea that voters identify with a political party out of blind emotional attachment, this pioneering book explains why party identification in contemporary American politics enables voters to make coherent policy choices....

This chapter focuses on how to think more productively about the democratic experiment and political competence. It begins by summarizing this study's theory and findings. It then looks at the implications of both theory and findings for a supply-side theory of political competence. Finally, it presents a nice irony of democratic politics. It is we...

This chapter explores a candidate-centered choice, creating an experimental setting biased in favor of candidate-centered spatial reasoning—removing any reference to political parties or their programs. The prediction is that, in spite of the absence of any reference to parties, many party supporters will nonetheless take into account the parties'...

This chapter presents a theory of candidate positioning. The key to this account is the policy reputations of the two political parties. Candidates must take positions consistent with the policy reputations of their parties to collect a reputational premium. The chapter's job is twofold. The first task is to demonstrate that programmatic party iden...

This chapter examines the party-centered theory of spatial voting. Party identification is essentially an emotional attachment to a political party. Typically, this affective attachment is acquired early in life, most commonly from one's parents but not infrequently from one's peers. Characteristically, party supporters' identification with their p...

Pundits and scholars have long criticized so-called midnight regulations on a variety of grounds. Although scholars have demonstrated that rulemaking activity increases during the midnight period, no study has addressed the question of whether midnight rules in fact systematically differ in any material way from rules passed in other times of a pre...

This article develops two new tests of partisan and nonpartisan theories of lawmaking based on cutpoint estimates and measures of uncertainty about ideal point estimates. Theories of congressional organization make explicit predictions about the absence of cutpoints in certain intervals of the policy space. We test these theories with new cutpoint...

The purpose of this study is two-fold. A central divide in the race-in-politics literature concerns whether people openly profess racially prejudiced statements or confine themselves to subtle racism. Our first objective is to examine this debate using new data from the 2008 election. Our second - and central - objective is to bring out the opposin...

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In this paper, we study the role of political parties in a legislative environment that makes decisions over both ideological and distributive policies. We develop a simple model in which the majority party leadership, seeking to achieve non-median policies as a means of maximizing the probability its party retains the majority, trades off distribu...