Bureaucratic Advice and Political Governance

Robin Boadway () and Motohiro Sato

Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2008, vol. 10, issue 4, pages 503-527

Abstract: This paper studies the conflict of interest between politicians and better-informed bureaucrats when they have differing preferences over a public project. We start with a baseline model where a bureaucrat advises a single decision maker (politician) whether to adopt a project. The bureaucrat can be punished if his misrepresentation of the project is detected. We extend this to multiple projects and multiple bureaucrats, and compare the level of Type I and Type II errors generated with centralized and decentralized decision making. This typically depends on the form of the distribution function that determines the bureaucrats' expectation of being disciplined. Copyright © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..

Date: 2008

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Related works:
Working Paper: Bureaucratic Advice and Political Governance (2006)
Working Paper: Bureaucratic Advice and Political Governance (2006)
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