 Political Accountability and Policy Experimentation: Why to Elect Left-Handed Politicians?No 647, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Abstract: In an environment where voters face an inference problem on the competence level of policy makers, this paper shows how subjecting these policy makers to reelection can reduce the degree of policy experimentation to the benefit of the status quo. This may be a reason why some notable policy experiments were implemented by non-accountable regimes (cf. Chile and China). Whether experimentation in representative democracies is suboptimally low, depends on society's degree of risk aversion relative to that of the decision maker. If the level of experimentation is suboptimal, taking decisions by direct democracy, or electing risk-loving politicians could improve welfare. Interestingly, risk-lovers also seem to be overrepresented among Presidents of various countries. Keywords: Policy experimentation; learning; political economy; reform; status quo bias; career concerns (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:647 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to econpapers@oru.se.
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.