The Political Economy of Technocratic Governments

Guido Merzoni and Federico Trombetta ()
Additional contact information
Guido Merzoni: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Federico Trombetta: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Social Choice and Welfare, 2025, vol. 64, issue 4, No 7, 879-913

Abstract: Abstract This paper proposes a game theoretical model of technocratic government, i.e. cases where a non political technocrat is put in charge by political parties. We find conditions for the existence of a technocratic government equilibrium, where parties agree to delegate the agenda setting power to technocrats, committed to maximize social welfare. Such an equilibrium exists only if technocrats are more competent than ordinary politicians. Furthermore, we show that unstable parliaments increase the range of parameters where a technocratic government equilibrium exists. Polarization can also increase the likelihood of a technocratic government.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-024-01551-0 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:spr:sochwe:v:64:y:2025:i:4:d:10.1007_s00355-024-01551-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-024-01551-0

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().