Bureaucrats or Politicians? Part I: A Single Policy Task

By A. Alesina, Guido Tabellini. 2007

552 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort, or if there is great uncertainty about whether the policymaker has the required abilities. The optimal allocation of redistributive tasks is ambiguous, and depends on how the bureaucrat can be instructed. But irrespective of the normative conclusion, the politician prefers not to delegate redistributive policies. (JEL D72, D73, D82)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5bea0ff75bec05033e0a00fdaedc7ce6266bf860

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Citations in the corpus

A Tale of Two Decades: The Ecb's Monetary Policy at 20 (2019, background): “Since high-level central bank bureaucrats are selected from within a supposedly conservativeminded group of experts, and are most concerned with maintaining a reputation for competence and institutional loyalty among their professional peers (Wilson (1989) and Alesina and Tabellini (2007)), they can”
Local Electoral Incentives and Decentralized Program Performance (2012, methodology): “The program’s impact in the municipality is h ¼ P i Pih zið Þ: 1 The model is an adaptation of the standard political agency model found in Barro (1973), Ferejohn (1986), Banks and Sundaram (1993), and, more recently, Alesina and Tabellini (2007).”
Political connections, SEC enforcement and accounting quality (2009, unknown): “incumbent politicians (Alesina and Tabellini, 2007).”
A Political Theory of Populism (2013, unknown): “Conversely, a large α could be interpreted as the elite constituting a relatively small group of the population.”
Traveling Agents: Political Change and Bureaucratic Turnover in India (2008, background): “See Prendergast (2007), Besley and Ghatak (2005), Mueller (2007), and Alesina and Tabellini (2007).”
The Politics of Monetary Policy (2010, background): “Alesina and Tabellini (2007,2008) also analyze a "positive" model of delegation, namely the case in which politicians can delegate or not certain tasks to bureaucrats having in mind their objective function, namely reelection.”
Electoral manipulation as bureaucratic control (2013, result): “…at the will of elected officials may behave more like politicians than like bureaucrats, relative to the benchmark established in models such as Alesina and Tabellini (2007, 2008). formulations, but in the second and third extensions, manipulation is unambiguously more likely when the ruler is…”
Intergovernmental Grants as Signals and the Alignment Effect: Theory and Evidence (2015, background): “…at the beginning of his term of office is a widely made one in the literature on political principal–agent models (e.g. Persson and Tabellini, 2002; Alesina and Tabellini, 2007); it keeps the analysis tractable while allowing the incumbent to signal his ability via higher public expenditure in…”
Learning About Voter Rationality (2018, unknown): “We will analyze how disasters affect voter behavior and electoral fortunes, using the canonical Bayesian learning framework (Achen 1992; Bartels 1993; Gerber and Green 1999).”
Career concerns and multitasking local bureaucrats: Evidence of a target-based performance evaluation system in China (2018, background): “Career concern theories suggest that top bureaucrats are largely driven by the outcomes of their mandated tasks (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991; Dewatripont et al., 1999; Alesina and Tabellini, 2007, 2008).”
Law Enforcement, Municipal Budgets and Spillover Effects: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Italy (2017, background): “As it is well known in the literature, decisions of politicians with electoral incentives are different from decisions of bureaucrats (Besley and Coate, 2003; Alesina and Tabellini, 2007).”