Political Accountability Under Alternative Institutional Regimes

Stephenson, Matthew C.; Nzelibe, Jide

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1152452

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Future work might also incorporate certain important concerns about judicial review this article has bracketed, such as judicial bias. More generally, the framework we develop here, when combined with the emerging literature on separation-of-powers between elected branches of government (e.g., Fox and Van Weelden 2010; Persson, Roland, and Tabellini 1997; Stephenson and Nzelibe 2010), may facilitate direct comparisons between judicial and political oversight of government decision making—a crucial issue in contemporary legal and policy debates, which the extant political economy literature has not fully engaged.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judicial Review as a Response to Political Posturing

Fox

Stephenson

2011

Am Polit Sci Rev

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(Friedman 2002), and has assumed increasing salience internationally as the power and influence of courts around the world has grown (Hirschl 2004). Many have defended judicial review as a way to reduce or correct systematic failures in legislative and executive decision making--thereby reducing the divergence between actual policy choices and those that would prevail in an ideally functioning representative democracy. Appropriately designed judicial review, on this view, can be justified on democratic grounds, even if judicial review is not itself a democratic institution. Critics, however, argue that judicial review tends to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the pathologies of representative democracy, and that the costs of judicial review typically exceed whatever benefits it may have.We analyze judicial review as a potential response to a particular problem: The incentive of elected officials to "posture" by taking bold but unwarranted action in response to a perceived emergency in order to appear competent to the voters. We begin by providing a brief overview of this potential problem and the debates over whether judicial review is an appropriate remedy. We then turn to presenting a model of political agency, without judicial review, to show how this sort of posturing may arise. We then modify this model by introducing judicial review.We show that judicial review has two main effects on the frequency of posturing. First, judicial reviewWe are grateful to

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judicial Review as a Response to Political Posturing

Fox

Stephenson

2011

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…Although several formal models investigate the effects of elections on the president's strategic behavior (e.g., Fox and Stephenson 2011;Groseclose and McCarty 2001;Howell and Wolton 2018;Judd 2017;Persson, Roland, and Tabellini 1997;Stephenson and Nzelibe 2010), these models focus on informational asymmetries between the president and a single representative voter and the role of the separation of powers in dispelling voters' uncertainty about the president. 4 Therefore, public opinion cannot serve as an independent constraint if the representative voter is not informed about whether the president is desirable.…”

Section: Unilateral Action and Voter Mobilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Presidential Unilateral Action as a Tool of Voter Mobilization

Kang¹

2020

Pres Stud Q

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I develop a formal model that investigates conditions under which the president acts unilaterally to establish a given policy. The key innovation is that unilateral action is considered a costly tool for voter mobilization. Presidential unilateral action activates voters' constitutional concerns, which increases the cost of voting and leads the president's supporters to abstain. However, it also provides extra expressive benefits of voting to the president's supporters who deeply care about the policy established by the unilateral action. Hence, the president acts unilaterally to establish the policy only if its mobilizing effects outweigh its demobilizing effects. This result implies that the president's unilateral action acquires popular support that can compensate for the lack of its constitutionality. I discuss the possibly benign effects of unilateral action that are conducive to an effective government and argue that it is necessary to account for these effects when making normative judgments about unilateral action.

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“… Of course, we would expect that these two forms of accountability would interact with each other, as Stephenson and Nzelibe () have convincingly argued. In a separate paper, still in progress, we analyse this challenging issue. …”

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confidence: 90%

When do Voters Weaken Checks and Balances to Facilitate Economic Reform?

Forteza

Pereyra

2018

Economica

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Strong checks and balances aimed at protecting citizens from government abuse of power are key features of well-performing democracies. Nevertheless, some presidents have enjoyed strong and often explicit popular support when they undermined these controls. We present a formal model of the trade-off between control on the executive and delegation to analyse voters' decisions on the strength of checks and balances. We argue that voters may support their loosening, even when this allows rent extraction, if they are convinced that checks on the executive are blocking necessary reforms. We discuss several cases of strong presidents in Latin America who, alleging that radical reforms were necessary, obtained popular support that allowed them to loosen checks on the executive. Some of these presidents had a pro-market and some an anti-market reform agenda so, as our model suggests, voters' willingness to remove checks and balances can emerge under both right-and left-wing executives.

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Political Accountability Under Alternative Institutional Regimes

Cited by 9 publications

References 33 publications

Judicial Review as a Response to Political Posturing

Judicial Review as a Response to Political Posturing

Presidential Unilateral Action as a Tool of Voter Mobilization

When do Voters Weaken Checks and Balances to Facilitate Economic Reform?

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