Government transparency and policymaking

Abstract

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,

Electoral Competition, Control and Learning

“…Extensions of this framework look at different aspects of elections and constitutional design (Fox, 2007;Fox and Stephenson, 2011). While these models incorporate policy differences, office-seeking concerns and asymmetric information, one of our contributions is to show that similar inefficiencies arise even with symmetric information and shared preferences: the career concerns of the incumbent are sufficient for him to implement an inefficient level of reform.…”

The Voters' Curses: The Upsides and Downsides of Political Engagement

“…As Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita (2013) points out, once this interdependency is taken into account it is no longer clear that voters benefit from being highly rational or more informed. In particular, too much information might hurt the voter by inducing politicians to pander to voters (Prat, 2005;Fox, 2007;Fox and Van Weelden, 2012), to promote too much policy changes (Levy, 2007), or to behave too uniformly (Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita, 2013). We share several features with this literature, but also show that the problem might be more fundamental than previously thought.…”

Analysing constitutional reform in Britain: Insights from economic approaches

“…In addition, while transparency may induce ministers to be more responsive to public demands, this may be at the expense of other incentives that encourage welfare-enhancing behaviour. Thus, the more that government actions are observed, the more incentive ministers have to behave in ways they think citizens will approve of, even when different policy decisions might actually generate greater aggregate levels of social welfare (Prat, 2006;Fox, 2007). This perspective highlights the difficult balance involved in any delegation of authority to a third party.…”