The Power to Define Political Problems: Authorization Architecture and the Direction of Public Policy

Public policy is shaped not only by choices among instruments but by the authority to define political problems and make collective purposes binding. This article asks whether a society facing comparable constraints might produce substantively different public policies when citizens retain final authorizing power instead of transferring that power to autonomous governing agents. It specifies D3 as an integrated, continuous and non-bypassable architecture of citizen authorization across problem definition, delegation, implementation, evaluation and revision. The principal explanatory contribution is a conditional account of policy differentiation through three mechanisms: the constitution of politically actionable problems, the binding translation of collective purposes into executive action, and social feedback capable of consequential reauthorization. Existing accounts of agenda control, collective self-institution and popular sovereignty are treated as substantial theoretical antecedents, not conflated with an identical explanation of policy direction. Greek cases involving non-performing loans, energy transition and defence procurement illustrate possible causal pathways; they do not test an implemented D3 regime. The theory neither predicts inevitable divergence nor guarantees more just or effective outcomes. It specifies when, how and with what observable implications differences in authorizing architecture could become differences in substantive policy.