Abstract
In this paper, we address empirically the trade-offs involved in choosing between bureaucrats and politicians. In order to do this, we map institutions of selection and retention of public officials to the type of public officials they induce. We do this by specifying a collective decision-making model, and exploiting its equilibrium information to obtain estimates of the unobservable types. We focus on criminal decisions across US states' Supreme Courts. We find that justices that are shielded from voters' influence ("bureaucrats") on average (i) have better information, (ii) are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case, and (iii) are more effective (make less mistakes) than their elected counterparts ("politicians"). We evaluate how performance would change if the courts replaced majority rule with unanimity rule.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 230-244 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Journal of Public Economics |
Volume | 97 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2013 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Finance
- Economics and Econometrics
Keywords
- Bureaucrats
- Common values
- Politicians
- Strategic voting
- Structural estimation