HOW DO POLICY‐MAKERS ACTUALLY SOLVE PROBLEMS? EVIDENCE FROM THE FRENCH LOCAL PUBLIC SECTOR

Benoît Le Maux

Economics and Politics, 2009, vol. 21, issue 2, 201-231

Abstract: This article examines how policy‐makers solve problems within local representative democracies. It will be argued that politicians cannot undertake an exhaustive search of all possible policy choices; instead, they might use an incremental strategy such as the hill‐climbing heuristic. These possibilities will be formalized using the median voter model as an analytical framework. The corresponding models will then be estimated over a set of French jurisdictions (the départements). The empirical results lend support to the hill‐climbing model, given that: (1) for social welfare and secondary school expenditures, the influence of the past is significant; (2) a pure model of incrementalism, without any exogenous variables, is not appropriate for explaining the behavior of departmental council members; and (3) the impact of the past is more significant and stronger when expenditure levels are higher.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0343.2009.00343.x

Related works:
Working Paper: How do policy-makers actually solve problems?Evidence from the French local public sector (2009)
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:bla:ecopol:v:21:y:2009:i:2:p:201-231

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0954-1985

Access Statistics for this article

Economics and Politics is currently edited by Peter Rosendorff

More articles in Economics and Politics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().