Bureaucrats or Politicians?Alberto Alesina () and Guido Tabellini () No 238, Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University Abstract: Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates the criteria that should lead a society to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non elected bureaucrats. Politicians tend to be preferable for tasks that have the following features: they do not involve too much specific technical ability relative to effort; there is uncertainty ex ante about ex post preferences of the public and flexibility is valuable; time inconsistency is not an issue; small but powerful vested interests do not have large stakes in the policy outcome; effective decisions over policies require taking into account policy complementarities and compensating the losers; the policies imply redistributive conflicts among large groups of voters. The reverse apply to the attribution of prerogatives to bureaucrats. New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igi:igierp:238 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University |
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