Discretion and the Authority of Rules

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between discretion and the production of authoritative rules and information in organizations. Building on themes first introduced in Max Weber's writings on bureaucracy and rationalization, I explain that the formalization of decision-making is an attempt to transform the existing allocation of cognitive effort, accountability, and trust in a division of labor. The first essay argues written rules and processed information acquire authority when their use is vindicated by results (outcomes) and when their construction follows procedural constraints that guard against arbitrariness (process). When this happens, these authoritative abstractions acquire a special kind of causal effect: they reduce the discretion exercised by decision-makers. Two recent cases of formalization are discussed in depth to illustrate the usefulness of this approach: the use of preregistration plans in scientific reform and the use of artificial intelligence in bureaucratic reform. The second essay analyzes rule-making from the point of view of courts. I conduct a large-scale analysis of the citation practices of the Colombian Constitutional Court, using a corpus of more than 28,000 rulings in the period between 1992 and 2024; introduce a novel statistical framework in which each citation is modeled as a choice among plausible alternatives; and take advantage of how the Court structures its tasks to reconsider the longstanding opposition between top-down and bottom-up approaches to formalization. The resulting picture is that of an organization that combines both approaches in ways that are tied to the nature of its tasks. Finally, the final chapter turns to a broader theoretical issue: the role of functionalist arguments in sociological explanations.