Michael M Ting
Biographic Data
| ID | 1162767 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael M Ting |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael M |
| FAMILY NAME | Ting |
| SIGNATURE | TING M M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1144-346X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 762 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Decentralization and ideology
Classic arguments about federalist governance emphasize an informational or learning role for decentralizing policy authority, but in practice, ideological outcomes frequently motivate this choice. We examine the role of ideology in the allocation of policy-making power by modeling a two-period interaction between an elected central executive and two local governments. Decentralization reduces the executive’s ability to set policy and control ext…
Institutions and Political Restraint
Recent political developments worldwide have focused attention on the fraying of political norms, often understood as informal restraints on opportunistic behavior. We present a model to study how norms of restraint interact with institutional checks and balances. In the model, an election determines which party holds office in each period over an infinite horizon. Each period presents the majority party with an opportunity to modify a status quo…
After defeat
How do governing parties respond in terms of ideological positioning when voted out of office? We study both theoretically and empirically the factors that shape parties’ responses following a loss. Studying national elections in advanced industrialized democracies over the past 70 years, we show that parties tend to counter their pre-election shifts, and do so particularly strongly following defeat. The extent of these ideological shifts is more…
Civil Service and Patronage in Bureaucracies
How do politicians staff the bureaucracy and what are the policy implications? We develop a dynamic model of personnel policy, bureaucratic quality, and electoral competition. In each period, incumbents choose how much to support patronage and civil service personnel systems. The civil service system is needed to produce public goods, but patronage provides private goods and improves an incumbent's reelection prospects. Incumbents must also worry…
The Political Economy of Governance Quality
This paper develops a dynamic theory of the social and political foundations of governance quality. In the model, groups of citizens have different expected needs for a public service, and citizens choose whether to demand service when the need arises. Politicians representing these groups can determine policy benefits and delegate to bureaucrats the ability to invest in long-run service quality. The main feature of the theory is its foundation f…
A Dynamic Model of Primaries
Primary elections are increasingly popular around the world, but historically political parties have typically chosen their candidate selection mechanisms in a decentralized manner. We develop a theory that accounts for variation in the use of primary elections in these settings. In our model, two parties choose candidates for general elections over an infinite horizon. Each party has an elite and a nonelite faction, where the elite faction can c…
Primary Elections and the Provision of Public Goods
We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of "core" party voters in their respective primary elections and "swing" voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideology and offer platforms that distribute a unit of public spending across group-specific private goods and public goods. Without primaries, candidate…
Politics and Administration
This article develops a theory of the administration and effectiveness of government programs. In the model, a bureaucrat chooses a mechanism for assigning a good to clients with uncertain qualifications. The mechanism applies a costly means test to verify the client's eligibility. A politician exercises oversight by limiting the bureaucrat's testing resources and the number of clients to be served. The model predicts the incidence of common admi…
Inequality, Aspirations, and Social Comparisons
We develop a model of adaptive learning with social comparisons. Actors are more likely to choose actions that recently yielded satisfactory payoffs; satisfaction is evaluated relative to an aspiration level that reflects previous payoffs and possibly other players’ payoffs. This captures the phenomenon of social comparison viareference groups. We show that if agents compare themselves to those who are receiving higher payoffs then in stable outc…
Direct and Indirect Representation
How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next elect…
Deep carbon reductions in California require electrification and integration across economic sectors
Meeting a greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target of 80% below 1990 levels in the year 2050 requires detailed long-term planning due to complexity, inertia, and path dependency in the energy system. A detailed investigation of supply and demand alternatives is conducted to assess requirements for future California energy systems that can meet the 2050 GHG target. Two components are developed here that build novel analytic capacity and extend previo…
Learning While Governing
Journal Article Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch Get access Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch by Sean Gailmard and John W. Patty. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2013. 336 pp. $30.00. Michael M. Ting Michael M. Ting Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 128,…
Elections and reform
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Legislatures, Bureaucracies, and Distributive Spending
This article develops a theory of bureaucratic influence on distributive politics. Although there exists a rich literature on the effects of institutions such as presidents, electoral systems, and bicameralism on government spending, the role of professional bureaucrats has yet to receive formal scrutiny. In the model, legislators bargain over the allocation of distributive benefits across districts. The legislature may either "politicize" a prog…
Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries
We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party’s candidate for a general election can be selected either by a “centralized” mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and …
Two’s Company, Three’s an Equilibrium
In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attentio…
Distributive Politics with Primaries
We develop a model of electoral competition in which two parties compete for votes amongst three groups of voters. Each party first internally selects one of two candidates to run in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideological platform and can promise a distribution of a unit of public spending across groups. Without primary elections, the selection process is random. With primary elections, an ideologically friendly s…
Social Comparisons in Games
A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion
We present a model of learning and policy choice across governments. Governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits, possibly learning about those benefits between the model's two periods. There are two variants of the model; in one, governments only learn from their own experiences, whereas in the other they learn from one another's experiments. Based on similarities between these two versions…
Whistleblowing
By skipping managers and appealing directly to politicians, whistleblowers can play a critical role in revealing organizational information. However, the protection of whistleblowers can affect managers' abilities to provide employees with incentives to exert effort. This paper explores this tradeoff with a model of agency decision-making under incomplete information. In the game, an employee's effort determines a project's quality, and a manager…
Regulatory Errors with Endogenous Agendas
How do a regulator's decisions depend on the characteristics and strategies of its external clients? We develop a theory of approval regulation in which an uninformed regulator may veto the submission of a better‐informed firm. The firm can perform publicly observable experiments to generate product information prior to submission. We find that when experimentation is short, Type I errors (approving bad products) are more likely for products subm…
Voting Weights and Formateur Advantages in the Formation of Coalition Governments
Over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions. To test key predictions of these models, we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001. These predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties' minimal-integer voting weights. We calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties. In addition, we develop a stati…
Roll Calls, Party Labels, and Elections
We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individual legislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators' preferences are private information, and they have two means of communicating their preferences to voters. First, they each have a “party label” that credibly identifies an interval within which their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votes may convey additional information about their preferences…
A Strategic Theory of Bureaucratic Redundancy
Do redundant bureaucratic arrangements represent wasteful duplication or a hedge against political uncertainty? Previous attempts at addressing this question have treated agency actions as exogenous, thus avoiding strategic issues such as collective action problems or competition. I develop a game‐theoretic model of bureaucratic policy making in which a political principal chooses the number of agents to handle a given task. Importantly, agents h…
A Behavioral Model of Turnout
The so-called “paradox of voting†is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens …
An Informational Rationale for Political Parties
This paper studies a model of political parties as informative "brands" to voters.Voters across a large number of constituencies are assumed to be risk averse and incompletely informed about candidate ideal policies, and candidates are unable to commit to a declared policy platform.In this environment, parties can play a critical role by aggregating ideologically similar candidates and signaling their preferences to voters.This signaling is effec…
A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion
We present a model of learning and policy choice across governments. Governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits, possibly learning about those benefits between the model's two periods. There are two variants of the model; in one, governments only learn from their own experiences, whereas in the other they learn from one another's experiments. Based on similarities between these two versions…
Voting Weights and Formateur Advantages in the Formation of Coalition Governments
Over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions. To test key predictions of these models, we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001. These predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties' minimal-integer voting weights. We calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties. In addition, we develop a stati…
A Behavioral Model of Turnout
The so-called “paradox of voting†is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens …
A Strategic Theory of Bureaucratic Redundancy
Do redundant bureaucratic arrangements represent wasteful duplication or a hedge against political uncertainty? Previous attempts at addressing this question have treated agency actions as exogenous, thus avoiding strategic issues such as collective action problems or competition. I develop a game‐theoretic model of bureaucratic policy making in which a political principal chooses the number of agents to handle a given task. Importantly, agents h…
Roll Calls, Party Labels, and Elections
We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individual legislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators' preferences are private information, and they have two means of communicating their preferences to voters. First, they each have a “party label” that credibly identifies an interval within which their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votes may convey additional information about their preferences…
Elections and reform
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Bargaining in Bicameral Legislatures
Malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures, it is widely argued, confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions. Ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures. The theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak. It is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se. Using a noncooper…
A Theory of Jurisdictional Assignments in Bureaucracies
What determines the allocation of tasks among government agencies? This paper develops a formal model of task allocation that argues that jurisdictions are strategically designed to achieve legislative goals. In the model, agencies choose unobservable policies, and political outcomes are a noisy indicator of these choices. The legislature therefore faces a compliance issue when the agencies’ policy preferences are different from its own. The legi…
Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries
We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party’s candidate for a general election can be selected either by a “centralized” mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and …
Whistleblowing
By skipping managers and appealing directly to politicians, whistleblowers can play a critical role in revealing organizational information. However, the protection of whistleblowers can affect managers' abilities to provide employees with incentives to exert effort. This paper explores this tradeoff with a model of agency decision-making under incomplete information. In the game, an employee's effort determines a project's quality, and a manager…
Regulatory Errors with Endogenous Agendas
How do a regulator's decisions depend on the characteristics and strategies of its external clients? We develop a theory of approval regulation in which an uninformed regulator may veto the submission of a better‐informed firm. The firm can perform publicly observable experiments to generate product information prior to submission. We find that when experimentation is short, Type I errors (approving bad products) are more likely for products subm…
Civil Service and Patronage in Bureaucracies
How do politicians staff the bureaucracy and what are the policy implications? We develop a dynamic model of personnel policy, bureaucratic quality, and electoral competition. In each period, incumbents choose how much to support patronage and civil service personnel systems. The civil service system is needed to produce public goods, but patronage provides private goods and improves an incumbent's reelection prospects. Incumbents must also worry…
The ``Power of the Purse'' and its Implications for Bureaucratic Policy-Making
Distributive Politics with Primaries
We develop a model of electoral competition in which two parties compete for votes amongst three groups of voters. Each party first internally selects one of two candidates to run in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideological platform and can promise a distribution of a unit of public spending across groups. Without primary elections, the selection process is random. With primary elections, an ideologically friendly s…
Legislatures, Bureaucracies, and Distributive Spending
This article develops a theory of bureaucratic influence on distributive politics. Although there exists a rich literature on the effects of institutions such as presidents, electoral systems, and bicameralism on government spending, the role of professional bureaucrats has yet to receive formal scrutiny. In the model, legislators bargain over the allocation of distributive benefits across districts. The legislature may either "politicize" a prog…
A Dynamic Model of Primaries
Primary elections are increasingly popular around the world, but historically political parties have typically chosen their candidate selection mechanisms in a decentralized manner. We develop a theory that accounts for variation in the use of primary elections in these settings. In our model, two parties choose candidates for general elections over an infinite horizon. Each party has an elite and a nonelite faction, where the elite faction can c…
Politics and Administration
This article develops a theory of the administration and effectiveness of government programs. In the model, a bureaucrat chooses a mechanism for assigning a good to clients with uncertain qualifications. The mechanism applies a costly means test to verify the client's eligibility. A politician exercises oversight by limiting the bureaucrat's testing resources and the number of clients to be served. The model predicts the incidence of common admi…
Primary Elections and the Provision of Public Goods
We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of "core" party voters in their respective primary elections and "swing" voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideology and offer platforms that distribute a unit of public spending across group-specific private goods and public goods. Without primaries, candidate…
The Political Economy of Governance Quality
This paper develops a dynamic theory of the social and political foundations of governance quality. In the model, groups of citizens have different expected needs for a public service, and citizens choose whether to demand service when the need arises. Politicians representing these groups can determine policy benefits and delegate to bureaucrats the ability to invest in long-run service quality. The main feature of the theory is its foundation f…
Two’s Company, Three’s an Equilibrium
In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attentio…
After defeat
How do governing parties respond in terms of ideological positioning when voted out of office? We study both theoretically and empirically the factors that shape parties’ responses following a loss. Studying national elections in advanced industrialized democracies over the past 70 years, we show that parties tend to counter their pre-election shifts, and do so particularly strongly following defeat. The extent of these ideological shifts is more…
Direct and Indirect Representation
How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next elect…
Learning While Governing
Journal Article Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch Get access Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch by Sean Gailmard and John W. Patty. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2013. 336 pp. $30.00. Michael M. Ting Michael M. Ting Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 128,…
Institutions and Political Restraint
Recent political developments worldwide have focused attention on the fraying of political norms, often understood as informal restraints on opportunistic behavior. We present a model to study how norms of restraint interact with institutional checks and balances. In the model, an election determines which party holds office in each period over an infinite horizon. Each period presents the majority party with an opportunity to modify a status quo…
The ``Power of the Purse'' and its Implications for Bureaucratic Policy-Making
An Informational Rationale for Political Parties
This paper studies a model of political parties as informative "brands" to voters.Voters across a large number of constituencies are assumed to be risk averse and incompletely informed about candidate ideal policies, and candidates are unable to commit to a declared policy platform.In this environment, parties can play a critical role by aggregating ideologically similar candidates and signaling their preferences to voters.This signaling is effec…
A Theory of Jurisdictional Assignments in Bureaucracies
What determines the allocation of tasks among government agencies? This paper develops a formal model of task allocation that argues that jurisdictions are strategically designed to achieve legislative goals. In the model, agencies choose unobservable policies, and political outcomes are a noisy indicator of these choices. The legislature therefore faces a compliance issue when the agencies’ policy preferences are different from its own. The legi…
Roll Calls, Party Labels, and Elections
We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individual legislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators' preferences are private information, and they have two means of communicating their preferences to voters. First, they each have a “party label” that credibly identifies an interval within which their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votes may convey additional information about their preferences…
A Strategic Theory of Bureaucratic Redundancy
Do redundant bureaucratic arrangements represent wasteful duplication or a hedge against political uncertainty? Previous attempts at addressing this question have treated agency actions as exogenous, thus avoiding strategic issues such as collective action problems or competition. I develop a game‐theoretic model of bureaucratic policy making in which a political principal chooses the number of agents to handle a given task. Importantly, agents h…
A Behavioral Model of Turnout
The so-called “paradox of voting†is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens …
Bargaining in Bicameral Legislatures
Malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures, it is widely argued, confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions. Ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures. The theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak. It is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se. Using a noncooper…
Voting Weights and Formateur Advantages in the Formation of Coalition Governments
Over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions. To test key predictions of these models, we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001. These predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties' minimal-integer voting weights. We calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties. In addition, we develop a stati…
Regulatory Errors with Endogenous Agendas
How do a regulator's decisions depend on the characteristics and strategies of its external clients? We develop a theory of approval regulation in which an uninformed regulator may veto the submission of a better‐informed firm. The firm can perform publicly observable experiments to generate product information prior to submission. We find that when experimentation is short, Type I errors (approving bad products) are more likely for products subm…
Social Comparisons in Games
A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion
We present a model of learning and policy choice across governments. Governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits, possibly learning about those benefits between the model's two periods. There are two variants of the model; in one, governments only learn from their own experiences, whereas in the other they learn from one another's experiments. Based on similarities between these two versions…
Whistleblowing
By skipping managers and appealing directly to politicians, whistleblowers can play a critical role in revealing organizational information. However, the protection of whistleblowers can affect managers' abilities to provide employees with incentives to exert effort. This paper explores this tradeoff with a model of agency decision-making under incomplete information. In the game, an employee's effort determines a project's quality, and a manager…
Two’s Company, Three’s an Equilibrium
In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attentio…
Distributive Politics with Primaries
We develop a model of electoral competition in which two parties compete for votes amongst three groups of voters. Each party first internally selects one of two candidates to run in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideological platform and can promise a distribution of a unit of public spending across groups. Without primary elections, the selection process is random. With primary elections, an ideologically friendly s…
Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries
We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party’s candidate for a general election can be selected either by a “centralized” mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and …
Elections and reform
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Legislatures, Bureaucracies, and Distributive Spending
This article develops a theory of bureaucratic influence on distributive politics. Although there exists a rich literature on the effects of institutions such as presidents, electoral systems, and bicameralism on government spending, the role of professional bureaucrats has yet to receive formal scrutiny. In the model, legislators bargain over the allocation of distributive benefits across districts. The legislature may either "politicize" a prog…
Deep carbon reductions in California require electrification and integration across economic sectors
Meeting a greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target of 80% below 1990 levels in the year 2050 requires detailed long-term planning due to complexity, inertia, and path dependency in the energy system. A detailed investigation of supply and demand alternatives is conducted to assess requirements for future California energy systems that can meet the 2050 GHG target. Two components are developed here that build novel analytic capacity and extend previo…
Learning While Governing
Journal Article Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch Get access Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch by Sean Gailmard and John W. Patty. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2013. 336 pp. $30.00. Michael M. Ting Michael M. Ting Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 128,…
Direct and Indirect Representation
How much can a constituency influence the power of its representative in the legislature? This article develops a theoretical model of the constituency basis of legislator influence. The key players in the model are interest groups that may receive targeted transfers from the legislature. The model predicts that the amount of transfers that such groups receive is increasing in their ability to help a party win a legislative seat in the next elect…
Inequality, Aspirations, and Social Comparisons
We develop a model of adaptive learning with social comparisons. Actors are more likely to choose actions that recently yielded satisfactory payoffs; satisfaction is evaluated relative to an aspiration level that reflects previous payoffs and possibly other players’ payoffs. This captures the phenomenon of social comparison viareference groups. We show that if agents compare themselves to those who are receiving higher payoffs then in stable outc…
Politics and Administration
This article develops a theory of the administration and effectiveness of government programs. In the model, a bureaucrat chooses a mechanism for assigning a good to clients with uncertain qualifications. The mechanism applies a costly means test to verify the client's eligibility. A politician exercises oversight by limiting the bureaucrat's testing resources and the number of clients to be served. The model predicts the incidence of common admi…
Primary Elections and the Provision of Public Goods
We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of "core" party voters in their respective primary elections and "swing" voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideology and offer platforms that distribute a unit of public spending across group-specific private goods and public goods. Without primaries, candidate…
A Dynamic Model of Primaries
Primary elections are increasingly popular around the world, but historically political parties have typically chosen their candidate selection mechanisms in a decentralized manner. We develop a theory that accounts for variation in the use of primary elections in these settings. In our model, two parties choose candidates for general elections over an infinite horizon. Each party has an elite and a nonelite faction, where the elite faction can c…
Civil Service and Patronage in Bureaucracies
How do politicians staff the bureaucracy and what are the policy implications? We develop a dynamic model of personnel policy, bureaucratic quality, and electoral competition. In each period, incumbents choose how much to support patronage and civil service personnel systems. The civil service system is needed to produce public goods, but patronage provides private goods and improves an incumbent's reelection prospects. Incumbents must also worry…
Political science (28 works) · Economics (26 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Business (11 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (10 works) · Local Government Finance and Decentralization (10 works)