Individual accountability, collective decision-making

Daniel Gibbs ()
Additional contact information
Daniel Gibbs: Virginia Tech

Constitutional Political Economy, 2023, vol. 34, issue 4, No 3, 524-552

Abstract: Abstract An influential theoretical literature studies a single executive’s electoral incentives to knowingly pursue bad policies because they are popular. I develop a model to study pandering in a legislative setting where multiple politicians, each accountable to their own constituency, are responsible for policymaking. Individual politicians receive private information about the best policy for achieving outcomes that citizens value. Politicians then privately deliberate to select a policy. Under certain conditions, politicians face electoral incentives to misrepresent their private evidence during deliberation in order to convince their colleagues to adopt a popular policy. I find that these perverse incentives become weaker as the number of politicians involved in policymaking increases. In larger groups, politicians share more responsibility for their policy choices. Individual politicians therefore have less to gain electorally from pandering. This result suggests that in addition to giving politicians more information about which policies are in citizens’ best interest, larger groups provide stronger incentives for politicians to use this information when policymaking is non-transparent.

Keywords: Pandering; Legislatures; Collective decision-making; Career concerns (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-023-09394-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:34:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s10602-023-09394-0

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

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-023-09394-0

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 ().