IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijcome/v2y2011i1p1-23.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A computational model of politicians–bureaucracy relationship in a competitively authoritarian environment

Author

Listed:
  • Vahe Lskavyan
  • Vardges Melkonian

Abstract

We develop a model that captures the basic characteristics of competitively authoritarian regimes. An incumbent (government) faces a challenge from a rival (opposition). There is also an agent (bureaucracy) who can shirk and can interfere in this contest. Shirking is costly to the incumbent. The contestants offer the agent contingent pay-offs that determine the agent's optimal strategy. This, in turn, determines each contestant's winning probability. We calculate this probability for every possible strategy combination of the contestants. The result is a two-player (incumbent–rival)zero sum game. We compute Nash Equilibria for several interesting scenarios and find that equilibria can exist where the incumbent deliberately encourages bureaucratic shirking (corruption) in exchange for loyalty. More generally, the incumbent's incentive to encourage shirking can depend on public dissatisfaction with shirking, the bureaucracy's electoral influence, the opposition's strength and the asymmetry in the contestants' ability to impose punishments on the bureaucrats.

Suggested Citation

  • Vahe Lskavyan & Vardges Melkonian, 2011. "A computational model of politicians–bureaucracy relationship in a competitively authoritarian environment," International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 2(1), pages 1-23.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijcome:v:2:y:2011:i:1:p:1-23
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=40574
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijcome:v:2:y:2011:i:1:p:1-23. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=311 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.