Efficienza delle regole e responsabilizzazione dei politici

Massimo Bordignon () and Enrico Minelli

Politica economica, 2000, issue 3, 285-304

Abstract: Allocative and redistributive rules in the public sector are often less contingent on available information than normative theory would suggest. In this paper we offer a political economy explanation. Under different rules, even if the observable outcomes of policies remain the same, the informational content which can be extracted by these observations is different. Simpler rules are more transparent because they allow citizens to gain more information on politicians. Since there are limits to what voters can observe, this may be a relevant insight into the functioning of the political system. We present several institutional examples supporting our argument and discuss a simple model which supports our theory. By using the same model, we also carefully discuss the links and the differences with several other strands of literature, such as the macroeconomic trade-off between rules and discretionality and the principal-supervisor-agent model in the regulatory context. Finally, we offer suggestions for further developments and possible empirical tests of the theory dicussed here.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1429/1498 (application/pdf)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1429/1498 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:mul:je8794:doi:10.1429/1498:y:2000:i:3:p:285-304

Access Statistics for this article

Politica economica is currently edited by Giuseppe Marotta

More articles in Politica economica from Società editrice il Mulino
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().