Slackers and Zealots: Civil Service, Policy Discretion, and Bureaucratic Capacity

In this paper we investigate how “civil service” personnel management interacts with bureaucratic discretion to create high capacity, expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We build a model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship specific) policy expertise, and may be either policy-motivated or policy-indifferent. We show that under specific conditions on the nature of expertise and bureaucratic discretion over policy choices, merit system protections for job tenure encourage the development of expertise and problem solving capacity in the bureaucracy. In addition, we identify conditions under which typical civil service rules encourage policy-motivated bureaucrats to enter and remain in public service, and policy- indifferent bureaucrats to leave it.Bureaucracy, Expertise, Discretion, Civil Service

Multiple Principals and Oversight of Bureaucratic Policy-Making.”

ABSTRACT I examine a model in which multiple legislative principals monitor a bureaucratic agent's implementation of a project. The principals can each perform oversight of the implementation to limit information asymmetries exploited by the agent. Oversight is costly to perform and due to information leakages between principals, oversight by one principal reveals information to all principals. Thus for some values of the audit costs, there is a collective action problem in monitoring among the principals: the multiplicity of principals can cause the level of this form of oversight to be underperformed relative to the principals' joint interests. Notably, the multiplicity of principals reduces their collective control over the agent even though they have common interests about the agent's actions, i.e. conflicting preference about agent actions are not necessary to attenuate accountability when there are multiple principals. Overall the results point out that the institutional structure of the overseeing body has an important effect on accountability, independent of the institutional structure of the overseen

Whose Ear (or Arm) to Bend? Information Sources and Venue Choice in Policy Making

Important conceptualizations of both interest groups and bureaucratic agencies suggest that these institutions provide legislatures with greater information for use in policy making. Yet little is known about how these information sources interact in the policy process as a whole. In this paper we consider this issue analytically, and develop a model of policy making in which multiple sources of information – from the bureaucracy, an interest group, or a legislature’s own in-house development – can be brought to bear on policy. Lobbyists begin this process by selecting a venue – Congress or a standing bureaucracy – in which to press for a policy change. The main findings of the paper are that self-selection of lobbyists into different policy making venues can be informative per se; that this self-selection can make legislatures willing to delegate more authority to ideologically distinct bureaucratic agents; and that delegation of authority, while it takes advantage of agency expertise, can nevertheless lead to an increase in the legislature’s own in-house information gathering (e.g., hearings). Changes within the Federal Trade Commission during the 1970s are reinterpreted in the context of our model.Delegation, Lobbying, Bureaucracy, Venue Choice, Discretion

Candidate positioning and voter choice.

T his article examines a fundamental aspect of democracy: the relationship between the policy positions of candidates and the choices of voters. Researchers have suggested three "A key characteristic of democracy," Dahl (1971, 1) noted, is the "responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens." Two mechanisms play central roles in promoting responsiveness, thereby fostering congruence between the preferences of voters and the policy positions of candidates. Voters in a democracy can select candidates that represent their views, and candidates can compete for votes by strategically taking positions that appeal to the electorate. Both mechanisms are important; each depends on the criteria voters use to judge politicians on the issues. A lively debate has focused on three theories about how voters judge the policy stances of candidates. The first, proximity theory, assumes that citizens prefer candidates whose positions are closest to their own. For example, a voter who favors a 5% increase in government spending on health care will be happiest with a candidate who advocates the same level of spending. The more a candidate's position diverges from the voter's, the less satisfied the voter will feel. The presumed positive relationship between proximity and satisfaction, Michael Tomz is Associate Professor

Principal Agent Models of Bureaucratic and Public Decision Making

In this thesis I investigate three situations in which a principal must make a public decision. The optimal decision from the principal's point of view depends on information held only by agents, who have different preferences from the principal about how the information is used. In the first two situations (Chapters 2 and 3) the principals and agents - legislatures and bureaus, respectively - are each part of the government and interact to create public policy. In Chapter 2 the bureau has private information about the cost of a public project, performed for multiple legislative principals who can each seek out cost information through oversight. The multiplicity of principals can cause the level of oversight to be inefficiently low due to a collective action problem. Further, the inefficiency becomes more likely as oversight becomes a more important part of the principals' utility functions, and as the oversight technology becomes more effective. For some parameters an increase in the effectiveness of the auditing technology reduces the welfare of the principals collectively. In Chapter 3 the bureau has substantive expertise about the effects of various policy choices. The principal can delegate policy making authority to the bureau to tap its expertise, but bureaus are imperfectly controlled by statutory restrictions. On the other hand, the scope for delegation can be reduced endogenously if the legislature chooses to acquire its own substantive expertise. I examine how strategic accounting for both bureaucratic subversion and costly development of legislative expertise affect the legislature's delegation decision. I also show that legislatures may in fact want subversion to be "cheap," while bureaucrats may want their own authority constrained and subversion to be costly. In the third situation (Chapter 4) the information desired by the principal is the valuation of an excludable public good for each member of society. I experimentally compare three collective choice procedures for determining public good consumption and cost shares. The first, Serial Cost Sharing, has attractive incentive properties but is not efficient; the other two are "hybrid" bidding procedures that never exclude any agents but are manipulable. I characterize Bayesian Nash equilibria in the hybrid mechanisms, and prove some more general properties as well. Serial Cost Sharing tends to elicit values successfully, but is outperformed on several efficiency criteria by a hybrid mechanism - despite its incentive problems and coordination problems due to multiple equilibria.</p