This book explains the different approaches legislators use when they write laws.

Looking at discretion broadly as the exercise of controlled freedom, this edited volume introduces insights from a range of social sciences perspectives. Traditionally, discussions of discretion have drawn on legal notions of the appropriate exercise of legitimate authority specified by legislators. However, empirical and theoretical studies in the social sciences have extended our understanding of discretion, moving us beyond a narrow legal view. Contributors from a range of disciplines explore the idea of discretion and related notions of freedom and control across social and political practices and in different contexts. As this complex and important topic is discussed and examined, both total control and unconstrained freedom appear to be illusions.

This book shows why the delegation of discretionary powers to professionals in the front-line of the welfare state is both unavoidable and problematic. It adds an epistemic dimension to the structural understanding of discretion, distinguishing between structural and epistemic measures of accountability.

The executive branch in Western democracies has been granted a virtually impossible task: expected to 'imperially' direct the life of the nation through thick and thin, it is concurrently required to be subservient to legislation meted out by a sovereign parliament. Drawing on a general argument from constitutional theory that prioritizes dispersal of power over concepts of hierarchy, this book argues that the tension between dominance and submission in the executive branch is maintained by the adoption of various forms of fuzziness, under which a guise of legality masks the absence of substantive limitation of power. Under this 'internal tension' vision of constitutionalism, the executive branch is simultaneously submissive to law and dominant over it, while concepts of substantive legality are compromised. Building on legal and political science research, this volume classifies and analyses thirteen forms of fuzziness, ranging from open-ended or semi-written constitutions to unapplied legislation. The study of this unavoidable yet problematic feature of the public sphere is addressed descriptively and normatively. Adding detailed examples from two fields of law - emergency law and air-pollution law - in two systems (the UK and the US), the book ends with a call for raising the threshold of judicial review, grounded in theories of participatory and deliberative democracy. This book addresses an area that is surprisingly under-researched. Despite the increase in executive power across democratic polities and increasing public interest in the executive branch and executive powers, this much-needed book offers a theoretical foundation that should ground all analysis of arguably the most powerful branch of modern government.

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.