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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Gabriele Gratton (UNSW Business School); Barton E. Lee (ETH Zurich) |
| Abstract: | We study a model of popular demand for anti-elite populist reforms that drain the swamp: replace experienced public servants with novices that will only acquire experience with time. Voters benefit from experienced public servants because they are more effective at delivering public goods and more competent at detecting emergency threats. However, public servants’ policy preferences do not always align with those of voters. This tradeoff produces two key forces in our model: public servants’ incompetence spurs disagreement between them and voters, and their effectiveness grants them more power to dictate policy. Both of these effects fuel mistrust between voters and public servants, sometimes inducing voters to drain the swamp in cycles of anti-elite populism. We study which factors can sustain a responsive democracy or induce a technocracy. When instead populism arises, we discuss which reforms may reduce the frequency of populist cycles, including recruiting of public servants and isolating them from politics. Our results support the view that a more inclusive and representative bureaucracy protects against anti-elite populism. We provide empirical evidence that lack of trust in public servants is a key force behind support for anti-elite populist parties and argue that our model helps explain the rise of anti-elite populism in large robust democracies. |
| Date: | 2024–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:swe:wpaper:2023-02b&r=cdm |
| By: | Carsten Hefeker; Michael Neugart |
| Abstract: | We develop a model to analyze policymakers’ incentives to install policy rules, comparing the case of no rule with a binding and a contingent policy rule that allows policymakers to suspend the rule in response to a sufficiently large shock. First, abstracting from political polarization, we show that the choice of the policy rule depends on policymakers’ policy targets. Depending on the policy target, there is an unambiguous ranking going from a no-rule regime to a contingent rule to a binding rule. Next, allowing for political polarization, the incentive to install the different types of rules changes with political polarization between different policymakers and their probability of being elected into office. Increasing political polarization when there is a sufficiently high election probability for policymakers with a high policy target increases the preference for more binding policy rules. It also leads to stricter rules in a contingent rule regime. |
| Keywords: | contingent policy rules, political polarization, time inconsistency, electoral uncertainty |
| JEL: | D78 E60 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11039&r=cdm |
| By: | Zhi Cao (Chinese University of Hong Kong); Arthur Lewbel (Boston College); Wenchao Li (Tongji University); Junjian Yi (Peking University) |
| Abstract: | We propose a new method for identifying bargaining power in collective house- hold models, based on information asymmetry. Our model allows household members to exploit an information advantage for bargaining. We formulate the household’s decision process under partial information disclosure using a Bayesian persuasion framework. We use this structure to point identify utility and bargaining power, which would not be identified under symmetric information. We illustrate these results by showing that our model can ex- plain known empirical outcomes regarding child educational investment and development in Chinese households where one parent is a migrant. |
| Keywords: | Collective model; Information asymmetry; Bargaining power; Bayesian persuasion; Left-behind children |
| JEL: | D11 D13 D82 D13 D82 J13 |
| Date: | 2024–04–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:bocoec:1070&r=cdm |