Citizen preferences and the architecture of government

Jean-Marc Bourgeon and Marie-Laure Breuillé ()
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Marie-Laure Breuillé: CESAER - Centre d'Economie et de Sociologie Rurales Appliquées à l'Agriculture et aux Espaces Ruraux - AgroSup Dijon - Institut National Supérieur des Sciences Agronomiques, de l'Alimentation et de l'Environnement - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

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Abstract: We consider the division of a territory into administrative districts responsible for providing a set of goods and services to residents who are sensitive to service congestion. We deduce the optimal architecture of public governance (i.e. the division of government into several levels, the distribution of services among them, their number of jurisdictions and the size of their administrations), which depends on how citizens weigh the performance capacity of administrations and the services they produce. We compare it to a decentralized organization where each jurisdiction is free to choose the size and scope of its administration. The resulting architecture generally involves more countries with fewer levels of administration than the optimal one. We use our results to estimate citizen preferences using U.S. data. We find that the country is divided into two zones ("Northeast & West" and "Midwest & South") whose estimated values are statistically different.

Keywords: Decentralization; Fiscal Federalism; Public Governance; H77; Public Governance JEL classification: H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07-19
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01869133v5
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Related works:
Journal Article: Citizen preferences and the architecture of government (2023)
Working Paper: Citizen preferences and the architecture of government (2023)
Working Paper: Citizen Preferences and the Architecture of Government (2018)
Working Paper: Citizen preferences and the architecture of government (2016)
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