Information accuracy in legislative oversight: Theoretical implications and experimental evidence

Abstract

The relationship between legislatures and bureaucracies is typically modeled as a principal-agent game. Legislators can acquire information about the (non-) compliance of bureaucrats at some specific cost. Previous studies consider the information from oversight to be perfect, which contradicts most real-world applications. We therefore provide a model that includes random noise as part of the information. The quality of provided goods usually increases with information accuracy while simultaneously requiring less oversight. However, bureaucrats never provide high quality if information accuracy is below a specific threshold. We assess the empirical validity of our predictions in a lab experiment. Our data show that information accuracy is indeed an important determinant of both legislator and bureaucrat decision-making.

Administrative delegation revisited: Experimental evidence on the behavioural consequences of public service motivation and risk aversion

“…However, rather than anticipating strategic interdependence, inspectors bluntly respond to higher control costs with less control, and inspectees provide higher effort with a higher punishment fee. Other experiments on the OG also find that inspectors care about the inspection costs and inspectees about the punishment fee (Nosenzo et al, 2014; Shikano et al, 2017).…”

“…PA theory has fundamentally challenged scholars’ understanding of oversight in administrative delegation (Miller, 2005; Miller and Whitford, 2007), even though the empirical validity of the game-theoretical solution is mixed at best (Rauhut, 2015; Rauhut and Winter, 2010; Shikano et al, 2017). More importantly, however, little attention has been given to alternative explanations of inspectees’ and inspectors’ behaviour.…”

The Quality of Political Information

“…It is contained by a single cell in the six-cell typology and thus clearly demarcated from other manifestations of the quality of political information. The same is true for Shikano et al (2017: 230), who conceive of “information accuracy” in bureaucratic decision-making as a form of component claim intelligibility that depends on the amount of noise included with pertinent information. Other studies use less clearly demarcated terms that cover a wider conceptual space extending into at least one additional manifestation of information quality.…”

“…Existing studies use a wide variety of partially overlapping and less than perfectly demarcated terms to identify different aspects and deficiencies of information quality, such as diagnostic value (Kuklinski et al, 2001), political clarity (Dalton, 1985), argument strength (Areni and Lutz, 1988), argument quality (Clark and Wegener, 2009), information accuracy (Shikano et al, 2017), misleading statements (Jerit and Barabas, 2006), fake news (Lazer et al, 2018), and imperfect information (Weyland, 2014). The eclectic terminology used in prior research reflects the absence of a commonly accepted and well-defined concept of the meaning and manifestations of the quality of political information.…”