Political selection and the optimal concentration of political power

Andreas Grunewald, Emanuel Hansen () and Gert Pönitzsch
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Andreas Grunewald: Goethe-University
Emanuel Hansen: University of Cologne
Gert Pönitzsch: Heidelberg University

Economic Theory, 2020, vol. 70, issue 1, No 8, 273-311

Abstract: Abstract We study how policy choice and political selection are affected by the concentration of political power. In a setting with inefficient policy gambles, variations in power concentration give rise to a trade-off. On the one hand, power-concentrating institutions allocate more power to the voters’ preferred candidate. On the other hand, they induce the adoption of more overly risky policies and decrease the voters’ capability to select well-suited politicians. We show that full concentration of power is optimal if and only if the conflict of interest between voters and politicians is small. Otherwise, an intermediate level of power concentration is optimal.

Keywords: Elections; Constitutional design; Selection; Asymmetric information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s00199-019-01210-x

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