Lobbying (strategically appointed) bureaucrats

Marco Sorge

Constitutional Political Economy, 2015, vol. 26, issue 2, 189 pages

Abstract: When are strategic appointments useful in curbing policy bias from ex-post negotiation between state agencies and special interest groups? Bertelli and Feldmann (J Public Adm Res Theory 17:19–38, 2007 ) provide an insightful analysis of the issue within a full information model of presidential appointments. This paper examines whether and how their findings extend to a world of policy uncertainty and asymmetric information, which rationalizes delegation in the first place. We establish that the occurrence of policy-relevant equilibrium lobbying crucially relies on interest groups’ leverage over the appointment game between higher-level institutions. Remarkably, bureaucratic lobbying may prove highly non-neutral with separated powers even when a candidate agency is agreed upon. In some circumstances (e.g., recess appointments in the US), by contrast, strategic appointments fully offset interest group influence in either form of government (unified versus divided), a finding in line with the conventional theory of delegation. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Legislative delegation; Strategic appointments; Bureaucratic lobbying; D72; D73; H1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10602-014-9178-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Lobbying (Strategically Appointed) Bureaucrats (2014)
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:kap:copoec:v:26:y:2015:i:2:p:171-189

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-014-9178-7

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().