Bureaucrats or Politicians? Part II: Multiple Policy Tasks

By A. Alesina, Guido Tabellini. 2008

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates first the normative criteria with which to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non-elected bureaucrats. Politicians are preferable if there is uncertainty about social preferences and flexibility is valuable, or if policy complementarities and compensation of losers is important. Bureaucrats are preferable if time inconsistency and short-termism is an issue, or if vested interests have large stakes in the policy outcome. We then compare this normative benchmark with the case in which politicians choose when to delegate and show that the two generally differ.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab9907884e4032c6c6a2f69aef7fad90f7418f01

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Citations in the corpus

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.”
Career concerns and multitasking local bureaucrats: Evidence of a target-based performance evaluation system in China (2018, methodology): “Following the seminal work by Dewatripont et al. (1999) and Alesina and Tabellini (2008), bureaucrats are partly motivated by their career concerns.”
Learning About Voter Rationality (2018, neutral): “See the T erm s and C onditions (https://onlinelibrary.w iley.com /term s-and-conditions) on W iley O nline L ibrary for rules of use; O A articles are governed by the applicable C reative C om m ons L icense shocks to voter welfare (Abney and Hill 1966; Ebeid and Rodden 2006; Kayser and Peress 2012”
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…”
Necessity As the Mother of Invention: Monetary Policy after the Crisis (2017, background): “For example, Alesina and Tabellini (2008) argue that delegation of decision-making authority to non-elected bureaucrats with career concerns (as opposed to politicians) is especially beneficial when the tasks are technical in nature and monitoring quality is difficult.”
Social Capital and Political Accountability (2010, positive): “Ferejohn (1986), Persson and Tabellini (2000), Alesina and Tabellini (2008), Besley (2006) study theoretical models where rational voters discipline moral hazard or adverse selection by the elected incumbent through retrospective voting.”