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Political Selection and the Optimal Concentration of Political Power

Andreas Grunewald

出版	SSRN, 2017
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=Lv36zgEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋

This paper studies how policy choice and political selection are affected by the concentration of political power -- a central aspect of political institutions. We consider a setting with inefficient policy gambles: In equilibrium, politicians choose overly risky policies in order to appear competent and increase their electoral prospects. In this setting, variations in power concentration give rise to a previously undiscussed trade-off. On the one hand, power-concentrating institutions are beneficial because they allocate more political power to the voters' preferred candidate. On the other hand, these institutions induce the adoption of more overly risky policies and decrease the voters' capability to select well-suited politicians. We show that full concentration of power is optimal if and only if the conflict of interest between voters and politicians is small. Otherwise, voter welfare is maximized by an intermediate level of power concentration.