Democracy and Executive Power : Policy Making Accountability in the US, the UK, Germany, and France / Susan Rose-Ackerman.

Contents
Introduction;
Policymaking accountability and public law;
Constitutional paradoxes;
Policymaking inside the executive;
Why independent agencies should be independent;
Policymaking norms : the value and limits of cost-benefit analysis and impact assessment;
Public participation;
The varieties of judicial review;
Policymaking accountability as a democratic value

"The question of how much rule-making authority a legislature can delegate to executive bureaus and agencies has recently become a source of controversy. Conservatives, who wish to limit the regulatory reach of the executive branch, advocate what Susan Rose-Ackerman calls a "transmission-belt" model, in which all relevant policy decisions are contained in the enabling statute, and the executive agency simply carries them out. The opposite approach is something she calls "chain of legitimacy," in which the legislature, by creating an agency and giving it a broad mandate, explicitly authorizes it to create policy. There are other models as well, but none, she argues, is a good fit with the needs of regulating in the public interest. Using a cross-national comparison of public policymaking in the United States, France, Britain and Germany, Rose-Ackerman argues that public participation must take a greater role in policymaking if regulatory legitimacy is to be preserved"-- Provided by publisher.