Delegation to civil servants in parliamentary democracies

Abstract. This article reviews institutional arrangements that cabinet ministers and other political actors employ to influence civil servant behavior in parliamentary democracies. I then discuss how unlike other theories of bureaucratic structure, the principal–agent framework can be employed to generate testable hypotheses about systematic cross–national variation in delegation instruments. I also offer an empirical illustration of the approach, one that examines the relationship between cabinet turnover and delegation strategies on health policy. The analysis underlines the need to be cautious about making claims concerning the impact of political factors (like cabinet instability) and institutional factors (like cabinet decision–making rules) on delegation outcomes without first examining how these factors influence delegation strategies themselves.