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In this paper, we address empirically the trade-offs involved in choosing between bureaucrats and politicians. In order to do this, we need to 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.

In this paper we argue that the number of candidates running for public office, their ideological differentiation, and the intensity of campaign competition are all naturally intertwined, and jointly determined in response to the incentives provided by the electoral system. We propose a simple general equilibrium model that integrates these elements in a unitary framework, and provide a comparison between majoritarian and proportional electoral systems.

This paper links the theory of interest groups influence over the legislature with that of congressional control over the judiciary. The resulting framework reconciles the theoretical literature of lobbying with the negative available evidence on the impact of lobbying over legislative outcomes, and sheds light to the determinants of lobbying in separation-of-powers systems. We provide conditions for judicial decisions to be sensitive to legislative lobbying, and find that lobbying falls the more divided the legislature is on the relevant issues. We apply this framework to analyze supreme court labor decisions in Argentina, and find results consistent with the predictions of the theory. Answering these questions is important for three main reasons. First, it will allow us to reassess the stability of the separation of powers' system in response to outside pressures. In particular, do potentially active interest groups reinforce or weaken judicial independence? Second, by explicitly modeling the interactions between the legislature and the courts in the policy making process, our framework clarifies the biases that result from putting the emphasis solely on the link between lobbying and legislative outcomes, and allows us to improve upon this benchmark. 1 Lobbying Under Separation of PowersThe asymmetric impact of lobbying on the payoffs of the court and the legislature shapes its effectiveness in affecting policy in equilibrium, and as a result, impacts interest groups' incentives to engage in costly lobbying activities in the first place. The overall effect of this asymmetry rests crucially on the extent of effective judicial independence.Were the court completely insensitive to outside pressures, the asymmetry would induce meager incentives for lobbying efforts. This degree of court seclusion, however, is unusual. While most judiciaries are isolated from direct public approval, they are not immune from elected politicians' influence. Indeed, in most democracies, judicial decisions are not the last word. Legislatures can normally reverse judicial statutory rulings with a simple majority, although overturning constitutional rulings normally requires a higher level of political consensus. The legislature can, furthermore, affect the court's incentives by imposing sanctions such as court enlargements (Gely and Spiller 1992), impeachments (Iaryczower, Spiller and Tommasi 2002), and in some countries simply by not reappointing them. 3 To sum up, the majorities in government can constrain the decisions of the court. This is the essence of the so-called, "separation of powers" literature: public opinion alters judicial decisions, but does so only indirectly, by affecting the composition and preferred policies of members of the legislature (see Segal 1997, and Bergara, Richman and Spiller 2003 for a discussion).