Late Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages is the historical period in which the struggle for control and hegemony of normative production begins, which until then had been either the exclusive domain of the monarch, or of assemblies of notable ecclesiastics, courtiers, nobles, already counting on representatives of the cities, began to demand a certain participation and control over the normative production carried out by the king. In this way, the assemblies would try to require the king to have their consent when carrying out the development of rules. It should be noted that on many occasions, the establishments pressured the monarch to solemnly undertake not to dictate new regulatory provisions without his prior consent, and to invalidate those that had been issued in this way, and although the king usually accepted such commitments, it should be noted that historically, he failed to comply with them quite frequently.
In a doctrinally opposite sense, it is in these moments when the reception of imperial Roman law occurs, which would encourage monarchs to monopolize all regulatory power, excluding any type of assembly in the process, and leaving the decision exclusively in royal hands.
In this way, depending on the particular historical events of each territory, they would lean towards one extreme or the other. In many countries, the situation led to absolutism, so that the monarch, in accordance with the principles of imperial Roman law, held all regulatory power, stripping the assemblies of all decision-making power. Despite this, the normative types differentiated based on their origin continue to be maintained, in part due to the king's de facto assumption of the power of the assembly, based simply on not bringing them together.
Exceptionally, one country, England, would follow a different path, thus becoming a true exception. Here, Parliament would manage to impose itself over the royal figure, consecrating, in 1689, the supremacy of the parliamentary norm over the monarch, through the promulgation of the Bill of Rights. The conflict raised with the house of Tudor and the Stuarts would end up giving victory to the side composed of Parliament itself and the judiciary, leaving the royal figure stripped of the power to suspend the laws, or to dispense with their compliance.
liberal revolution
With the appearance and consolidation of liberal ideology, the model established mostly in Europe (the absolutist one) will enter into crisis. Faced with the total monarchical dominance of regulatory power, a theoretical model inspired by opposing principles begins to take hold, that is, in the transfer of regulatory power to Parliament, in an exclusive manner.
Although historically there are two evolutionary branches (the Latin and the Germanic), both will coincide in assuming the need for regulatory power attributed to the executive, given the inability that a Parliament has to carry out the task of issuing the immense amount of necessary regulations, in a minimally efficient way.
In the cases of Latin countries (France, Italian peninsula, etc.), the regulatory power that liberal principles denied will be restored to the monarch. However, its power is subordinated to the normative production that comes from Parliament, thus creating a regulatory power that is hierarchically inferior to the legislative power" held by Parliament.
In the French case, the Revolution of 1789 meant the radical and fulminating disappearance of regulatory power. However, in less than ten years, the system once again granted such power to the Government, whose objective was to be the execution of the laws.
In Spain a similar evolution will occur, only in a shorter period. In just one year, the Cortes of Cádiz went from eliminating the executive's regulatory power to granting it in favor of legal execution.
Despite all this, throughout the century there is an evolution of regulatory power that will culminate in the appearance of new regulatory types, which in some cases will have the force of law. Thus, at first the regulations of royal prerogative appear, dedicated to matters such as the regulation of the colonies, noble titles and military organization. Later, the requirement of express legal authorization for regulations that seek to develop the law will be dispensed with, through the facts. A third step comes with the gradual emergence of autonomous regulations that did not seek to develop a law, but rather to regulate what had not been under legal regulation. Finally, the Government will be given regulatory power that would allow it to issue regulations with the force of law, such as "enabling laws", "legislative delegation") or decree laws.
Parallel to the system of the Latin countries, the so-called Germanic system, belonging to the German Confederation, develops. In it, following the bases of the constitutional or limited monarchy, a horizontal relationship is established between the law and the regulation, so that the normative production is divided according to the matter to be regulated, producing a distribution of powers in which everything related to freedom and property is regulated by law, and everything else by regulation.
Later, reaching the decade of 1880, the Germanic system underwent a doctrinal change as a result of the theoretical postulates of Paul Laband") and Georg Jellinek, according to which, all regulations that affected the legal sphere of the subject had to be considered material law, so that regulations only had to be issued after the express legal authorization of Parliament, by way of law. Regulatory power was thus reduced to administrative regulations (referred to to the internal organization of the Public Administration) and to the development of the law, not being able to contradict its provisions, and thus outlining a principle of hierarchical superiority of the law over the regulations.
It should be noted that the two aforementioned authors had immense doctrinal weight in the development of German public law, so the implementation of their postulates occurred without major conflicts. In this way, the change would be applied both under the Imperial Constitution of 1871 and under the Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Bonn Fundamental Law. The development of the Germanic system, despite being born with a markedly more authoritarian character than the Latin one, will evolve until it is closer to the pure liberal model than the Latin one.
Since World War II
Since the second half of the 20th century, there has been an overwhelming increase in standards, growth sustained mainly by regulatory production. The presence of the regulation will be proportionally majority, to the extent of cornering legislative production into a small portion of the total regulatory production.
Likewise, there is also an exponential increase in the number of subjects that enjoy regulatory power. In this way, not only the Government, but also its Ministers obtain such power that it will be attributed even to bodies lower in hierarchy than the Ministry.
In Spain, furthermore, there is an increase in the number of subjects with regulatory power due to the proliferation of territorial entities, which in cases such as those of the autonomous communities implies a dispersion of power at the internal level, similar to what happened with respect to central power. It could be said that thanks to the latter, the subjective dispersion of central and regional regulatory power grows in parallel, with the consequent doubling of the increase in subjects to whom such power is attributed.
On the other hand, there is a radical change in the residual vision that was had, throughout the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, of the figure of the regulation. The political changes that strengthen the contemporary democratic State mean that the Administration and its bodies obtain recognition of their legitimacy "Legitimacy (political)") as a democratic entity. For this reason, its normative production will enjoy a better doctrinal perception, which although it continues to see in it a potential risk for the rule of law, admits it in an ordinary sense, excluding in any case the rejection that the regulation has historically aroused in the theories of the liberal State.
A regulation is an organized set of rules of conduct, procedures and rights, all related to the members of a community.