To Elect or to Appoint? Bias, Information, and Responsiveness of Bureaucrats and Politicians

Iaryczower, Matías; Lewis, Garrett; Shum, Matthew

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1615781

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 53 publications

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“…The role of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in policy-making has been discussed for decades both in the USA (Arrow et al, 1996); the European Union (EU) (Löfstedt, 2004;Rose-Ackerman, 2007;Delbeke et al, 2010;European Commission, 2015;Carrigan & Shapiro, 2016;Mouter, 2017;Sunstein, 2017), and the OECD (Casullo & Zhivov, 2017). Since a commonly assumed reason for the delegation of authority from a legislature (politicians) to government authorities (bureaucrats) is that the bureaucrats have an information advantage over the politicians (Hiriart & Martimort, 2012;Iaryczower et al, 2013;Khalil et al, 2013), bureaucrats' information search activities, including a CBA are central for both policy-making and the implementation of legislation. But it is reasonable to assume that the bureaucrats have, and in that case, use their information advantage?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of Individual Characteristics and Institutional Norms on Bureaucrats’ Use of Cost–Benefit Analysis: A Choice Experiment

Hammes

Nerhagen

Fors

2020

J. Benefit Cost Anal.

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A commonly assumed reason for the delegation of authority from a legislature (politicians) to bureaucracies is that the bureaucrats have an information advantage over the politicians, including knowledge of cost–benefit analysis (CBA). But it is reasonable to assume that the bureaucrats use their information advantage by taking all relevant aspects of policy into account? We model the use of CBA using a delegation model and then test the theoretical predictions with empirical data collected from five Swedish government agencies. The empirical results lend support both for the hypothesis that risk aversion concerning the environmental outcome, the bureaucrats’ environmental attitudes, and the cost of taking CBA information into account have a considerable impact on the probability of using information from a CBA. Hence risk averse and bureaucrats with strong environmental preferences are less likely and bureaucrats with low cost of doing a CBA more likely than other bureaucrats to use CBA information. Finally, a binding governmental budget constraint may positively influence a bureaucrat’s choice of using CBA information. A tentative conclusion is therefore that it may be possible to increase the use of CBA by making the budgetary consequences of policies much clearer and demanding due consideration of costs.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of Individual Characteristics and Institutional Norms on Bureaucrats’ Use of Cost–Benefit Analysis: A Choice Experiment

Hammes

Nerhagen

Fors

2020

J. Benefit Cost Anal.

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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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Using Roll Call Estimates to Test Models of Politics

Clinton

2012

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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Measuring the preferences of political elites is critically important for analyzing the determinants and consequences of elite behavior. The decisions that elites make when casting roll call votes seem to provide an ideal opportunity for measuring elite preferences and testing theories of the political process. The fact that the resulting ideal points are a consequence of applying a statistical model to a model of individual choice, however, may affect their usefulness for measuring elite preferences and testing predictions regarding individual and collective decision making. When analyzing roll call votes, scholars should be mindful of how their decisions may affect the estimates from their analyses. I use simulations to illustrate how the nonrandom selection of roll calls may affect the ability to estimate ideal points that accurately reflect the preferences responsible for generating the observed votes, and I discuss work integrating the many models involved in the production and consumption of roll call estimates.

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To Elect or to Appoint? Bias, Information, and Responsiveness of Bureaucrats and Politicians

Cited by 9 publications

References 53 publications

The Influence of Individual Characteristics and Institutional Norms on Bureaucrats’ Use of Cost–Benefit Analysis: A Choice Experiment

The Influence of Individual Characteristics and Institutional Norms on Bureaucrats’ Use of Cost–Benefit Analysis: A Choice Experiment

Are tenured judges insulated from political pressure?

Using Roll Call Estimates to Test Models of Politics

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