To elect or to appoint? Bias, information, and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians

Iaryczower, Matías; Lewis, Garrett; Shum, Matthew

doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2012.08.007

Cited by 60 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 54 publications

(37 reference statements)

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“…We do so by interacting the main independent variables of interest with a dummy 'Reform' that captures whether a promotion committee made its decision after June 2003. 24 The first column of Table 6 contains a single interaction with the binary 'Elite' variable.…”

Section: Empirical Strategy and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This, together with the quotes from Section 2, suggests that in practice promotion decisions are delegated to the Heads of Division. 24 We have also re-run the specifications in Table 3 is equal to zero is therefore equivalent to testing whether, during the reform period, the Elite differential varied with the type of of vacancy. We reject the null hypothesis of this test at the 10% level (p-value=.059).…”

Section: Empirical Strategy and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are tenured judges insulated from political pressure?

Vidal¹,

Leaver²

2011

Journal of Public Economics

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Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be insulated from political pressure and, as a result, indifferent to the concerns of the electorate. We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by senior English judges between 1985 and 2005. Throughout this period the popular view was one of ill-disciplined elitism: senior judges were alleged to be favouring candidates from elite backgrounds over their equally capable nonelite counterparts. We find evidence in support of this view to be surprisingly weak; most of the unconditional difference in promotion prospects between the two groups can simply be explained by differences in promotion-relevant characteristics. We then exploit an unexpected proposal to remove control over promotions from the judiciary and find that judges' behaviour dramatically changed. When faced by the prospect of losing autonomy, senior judges began to favour non-elite candidates, as well as candidates who were unconnected to members of the promotion committee. * We thank Oriana Bandiera, Pablo Casas-Arce, Daniel Ferreira, Paul Klemperer, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, Howard Smith, Kathy Spier, John Vickers, various seminar audiences and, in particular, the Editor and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Baroness Hale, Kate Malleson, Lord Justice Maurice Kay, the Commission for Judicial Appointments, Her Majesty's Courts Service and the Ministry of Justice for many useful conversations. All errors are our own.

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Section: Empirical Strategy and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Empirical Strategy and Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are tenured judges insulated from political pressure?

Vidal¹,

Leaver²

2011

Journal of Public Economics

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“…As an example, Iaryczower and Shum (2012) examine voting behavior in the US supreme court and build an equilibrium model of decision making to quantify the value of information. Iaryczower, Lewis, and Shum (2013) also look at the US supreme courts and investigate the trade-off between politicians and bureaucrats. While the standard spatial voting model assumes sincere voting, this assumption can be relaxed.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring hawks and doves from voting records

Eijffinger

Mahieu

Raes

2018

European Journal of Political Economy

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We analyze revealed policy preferences in monetary policy committees. From the voting records of the Bank of England we estimate the policy preferences with spatial models of voting. We analyze systematic patterns in these policy preferences. We find that internal committee members tend to hold centrist policy preferences while pronounced policy preferences are generally held by external members. Committee members with a career in academia and the industry hold more diverse policy preferences whereas committee members with central bank experience exhibit little heterogeneity in preferences. The median voter does not vary systematically according to career background. Most central banks take monetary policy decisions by committee. Committee in this context is not a well-defined organizational concept but refers loosely to a group of people taking decisions. Differences between committees relate to the decision protocol, the (in)formal hierarchy, the size and to the composition. One key difference is the composition of committees. In this paper we focus on the composition and how the diversity of views are related to and influenced by the composition of the committee. Some committees consist mainly of career central bankers who have extensive experience at the central bank, whereas other committees consist mostly of external members recruited outside of the central bank.Besley, Meads, and Surico (2008) argue that the internal-external dichotomy could matter for at least two reasons. First, the selection procedure for internal and external members is in many cases formally different. Second, career concerns could affect incentives. Externals leave after their terms whereas internal members may be building a further career in central banking. Also the backgrounds of committee members differ. Experience in the financial industry, at an NGO or with the government may influence how these committee members approach monetary policy making. The model we use is unidimensional. The latent dimension on which we classify monetary policy committee members is called a dove-hawk dimension. We present two main results. First we show that internals are not more hawkish than externals (or vice versa). This is related to a debate in the literature on voting at the Bank of England where some researchers claim that internal members tend to be more hawkish whereas other researchers argue that this is not the case. Our results support the latter strand of the literature.1 However, we find that internals tend to have centrist policy preferences whereas as the most pronounced policy preferences (very dovish or very hawkish) are nearly always held by external members.Our second result is that the policy preferences are not systematically influenced by career backgrounds.The median voter does not change substantially when we consider monetary policy committee members with different career backgrounds. However, career backgrounds seem to be related to the heterogeneity in policy preferences. We find less variation in policy prefere...

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“…Much of the struggle in this literature focuses on constructing the appropriate observable and objective measure of judicial performance (see, e.g., Choi and Gulati 2006;Choi et al 2008). More recent empirical work has focused on how judicial selection interacts with heterogenous preferences and private information on the courts (Iaryczower and Shum 2012;Iaryczower et al 2013). In contrast, this article abstracts from judicial selection effects and explores the connection between judicial group size and outcomes.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Trial and Error: Decision Reversal and Panel Size in State Courts

Halberstam

2015

J Law Econ Organ

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Using cross-state and within-court variation, I show that lower court decisions are reversed more frequently by larger, rather than smaller, panels of high court judges. Overall, conditional on being reviewed, the probability that a case is reversed by a high court judicial panel is less than one half. To understand these findings, I develop a simple framework that connects reversals and panel size with the extent to which judicial decision-making is congruent with the law. Assuming the high court rules correctly more often than not, my empirical results suggest that increasing judicial panel size erodes the quality of decision-making in high courts. These results are consistent with a large literature investigating small group size effects on productivity and output. (JEL D02, D71, H41, K40)

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To elect or to appoint? Bias, information, and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians

Cited by 60 publications

References 54 publications

Are tenured judges insulated from political pressure?

Are tenured judges insulated from political pressure?

Inferring hawks and doves from voting records

Trial and Error: Decision Reversal and Panel Size in State Courts

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