Bureaucrats in Parliament: Theory and Evidence on Its Determinants in Germany

Thomas Braendle and Alois Stutzer

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: This paper addresses the personal linkages between the public administration and the legislature that emerge because public servants pursue a political mandate. There are concerns that the strong representation of bureaucrats in many Western parliaments compromises the constitutionally proposed political neutrality of the public service and generates a conflict of interest. We present a cost-benefit calculus and analyze specific legal provisions for the German Laender to understand the selection of public servants into parliaments. Based on a novel data set, we find that incompatibility rules decrease and abeyance compensation increases the fraction of public servants in Laender parliaments.

Keywords: Political selection; parliamentary election; public servants; incompatibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H11 H83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2008-23.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2008-23.htm Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Bureaucrats in parliament: theory and evidence on its determinants in Germany (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cra:wpaper:2008-23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).