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Comparative Analysis of Politician-Bureaucratic Governance Structure and Citizens’ Preference

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Applied Economic Analysis of Information and Risk

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the allocation of authority of policy making between politicians and bureaucrats and analyze the efficiency of the political governances in several political-administrative institutions. In general, politicians pick up the subjects of policy and carry out the policy after the examination of these subjects with bureaucrats. Namely, they clarify the contents of these subjects, consider the basic line of the policy, adjust some stakes, and enact the policy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On the contrary, we can consider the reelection probability model which has complementarity for both agents’ efforts.

  2. 2.

    We can discuss about the case that the politicians and the bureaucrats make an effort cooperatively.

  3. 3.

    The result of the game when the timing of the politicians’ and the bureaucrats’ decision is simultaneous is same as the game in this paper. We explain later, because the bureaucrats’ effort strategy is dominant strategy, it does not affect the result of the game.

  4. 4.

    Although we can understand this citizens’ judge as the signal of the politicians’ ability, we must discuss more about the relevance of using the result of election as the signal of bureaucrats’ ability. However, by assuming that the term of the bureaucrats in office is equal to that of the politicians in office, this can be justified.

  5. 5.

    In fact, if incumbent politicians who work with these bureaucrats are reelected, this government goes into the second term and the bureaucrats obtain easily the interest or bribes from several special interest groups.

  6. 6.

    This reelection rent includes not only the monetary rents as the wage and the pension for representative that the reelected politicians can derive from the nation and the subsidies for political parties but also the non-monetary rents as the politicians’ satisfaction and vanity by obtaining the post of the representative.

  7. 7.

    We can interpret this political and administrative output as the effect on the accountability to the citizens. Namely, the politicians’ and the bureaucrats’ efforts indicate that how they fulfill their accountability to the citizens. Unless the politicians and the bureaucrats fulfill sufficient accountability, since the citizens’ preference to the policy will be based on their own ideology, the range of this distribution will be wide. However, if they fulfill sufficient accountability to the citizens, it is considerable that this accountability makes easier to persuade the citizen. Therefore, the degree of the uncertainty will decrease.

  8. 8.

    We can easily check that this expected social welfare function satisfies second order conditions.

  9. 9.

    Needless to say, these bureaucrats make an effort to carry out their regularly administrative tasks except the delegated work from the politician.

  10. 10.

    In this way, as for the allocation of the politicians’ and the bureaucrats’ authority, it ought to be decided as the constitution, not the politicians’ decision. However, in many countries, the politicians and the bureaucrats carry out the making of agenda setting which relates to the actual constitutions. Unless the nation adopts the direct democracy, it is so difficult to rule the boundary between the administration and the legislative by the citizens’ judge as national voting, although such a problem ought to be resolved by the citizens’ judge. Therefore, to clarify the disadvantage of the representative democracy, it would be significant to compare these two regimes.

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Correspondence to Moriki Hosoe .

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Hosoe, M., Kanazaki, M. (2020). Comparative Analysis of Politician-Bureaucratic Governance Structure and Citizens’ Preference. In: Hosoe, M., Kim, I. (eds) Applied Economic Analysis of Information and Risk . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3300-6_6

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