Accountability in Governing Hierarchies

• In Event: Agency and Accountability

Abstract

Formal theories of accountability and bureaucratic politics typically consider the voter-politician interaction in isolation from the politician-bureaucrat interaction. In this paper, we study a model of electoral accountability and policymaking in a voter-politician-bureaucrat hierarchy. Policy outcomes are the joint product of both politician and bureaucrat choices. The voter faces uncertainty about the types of both the politician and the bureaucrat. The voter screens the politician for congruence via elections. The politician decides whether to retain or replace the bureaucrat. Politicians may choose policies to maximize reelection prospects while simultaneously punishing 'good' bureaucrats due to electoral concerns. Similarly, 'good' bureaucrats may shirk in order to harm the prospect of 'bad' politicians being reelected. We contrast our results with canonical results of political agency models in which only one 'link' of the overall delegation chain is analyzed.

Authors

• Christopher Miao Li, Yale University

• Gregory Sasso, Università Bocconi

• Ian R. Turner, Yale University