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Bureaucratic Advice and Political Governance
Author(s) -
BOADWAY ROBIN,
SATO MOTOHIRO
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of public economic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.809
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-9779
pISSN - 1097-3923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9779.2008.00374.x
Subject(s) - misrepresentation , bureaucracy , advice (programming) , politics , corporate governance , function (biology) , economics , distribution (mathematics) , baseline (sea) , microeconomics , law and economics , business , public administration , political science , law , finance , computer science , mathematical analysis , mathematics , evolutionary biology , biology , programming language
This paper studies the conflict of interest between politicians and better‐informed bureaucrats when they have differing preferences over a public project. We start with a baseline model where a bureaucrat advises a single decision maker (politician) whether to adopt a project. The bureaucrat can be punished if his misrepresentation of the project is detected. We extend this to multiple projects and multiple bureaucrats, and compare the level of Type I and Type II errors generated with centralized and decentralized decision making. This typically depends on the form of the distribution function that determines the bureaucrats' expectation of being disciplined.