We argue that making lawmakers more accountable to the public by making it easier to identify their policy choices can have negative consequences. Specifically, we analyze a model of political agency with a single lawmaker and a representative voter. In our model, the lawmaker has better information than the voter about the appropriateness of alternative policy courses. In addition, the voter is uncertain about the incumbent's policy preferences – specifically, the voter is worried the incumbent is an ideologue. Our model suggests that when lawmakers expect their policy choices to be widely publicized, for those lawmakers sufficiently concerned about reelection, the desire to select policies that lead the public to believe they are unbiased will trump the incentive to select those policies that are best for their constituents. Hence, lawmakers who would do the right thing behind close doors may no longer do so when policy is determined in the open. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Government transparency, Political agency,

When do elections induce politicians to act as delegates, and when do they induce them to act as trustees? To answer this question, we develop a model of political accountability in which politicians vary in both their policy preferences and their competence. We show that elections are more likely to induce politicians to behave as trustees when uncertainty about incumbent policy preferences is low. Otherwise, voters are often unable to credibly commit to vote retrospectively, and incumbents are electorally rewarded for the positions they take as opposed to the outcomes that they generate. Our theoretical results help us understand a number of empirical puzzles, such as why voters sometimes re-elect politicians who are known not to share their preferences. The model also yields predictions about several other factors that determine whether elected officials will act as delegates or trustees.

(Friedman 2002), and has assumed increasing salience internationally as the power and influence of courts around the world has grown (Hirschl 2004). Many have defended judicial review as a way to reduce or correct systematic failures in legislative and executive decision making--thereby reducing the divergence between actual policy choices and those that would prevail in an ideally functioning representative democracy. Appropriately designed judicial review, on this view, can be justified on democratic grounds, even if judicial review is not itself a democratic institution. Critics, however, argue that judicial review tends to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the pathologies of representative democracy, and that the costs of judicial review typically exceed whatever benefits it may have.We analyze judicial review as a potential response to a particular problem: The incentive of elected officials to "posture" by taking bold but unwarranted action in response to a perceived emergency in order to appear competent to the voters. We begin by providing a brief overview of this potential problem and the debates over whether judicial review is an appropriate remedy. We then turn to presenting a model of political agency, without judicial review, to show how this sort of posturing may arise. We then modify this model by introducing judicial review.We show that judicial review has two main effects on the frequency of posturing. First, judicial reviewWe are grateful to

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