IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v35y2019i3p544-578..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Political Agency, Oversight, and Bias: The Instrumental Value of Politicized Policymaking

Author

Listed:
  • Ian R Turner

Abstract

We develop a theory of policymaking between an agent and an overseer, with a principal whose welfare is affected by agent-overseer interactions. The agent can increase the quality of policy outcomes through costly capacity investments. Oversight and agent bias jointly determine optimal agent capacity investments. We show that when oversight improves agent investment incentives the principal always benefits from an agent with biases opposite the overseer. Competing agent-overseer biases translate into higher quality policy outcomes than the principal could induce were she monitoring the agent. Effective oversight is necessary for these incentive effects. The results imply that political principals ought to consider the nature of the broader policymaking environment when appointing agents to make policy on their behalf and when designing managerial strategies aimed at motivating agents.

Suggested Citation

  • Ian R Turner, 2019. "Political Agency, Oversight, and Bias: The Instrumental Value of Politicized Policymaking," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 35(3), pages 544-578.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:35:y:2019:i:3:p:544-578.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewz011
    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.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Blumenthal, Benjamin, 2024. "Informational Lobbying and Implementation Standards," SocArXiv 2kbas, Center for Open Science.
    2. Patty, John & Turner, Ian R, 2024. "Strange Bedfellows: How the Need for Good Governance Shapes Budgetary Control of Bureaucracy," OSF Preprints pnx2u, Center for Open Science.
    3. Li, Christopher M. & Sasso, Greg & Turner, Ian R, 2023. "Managing Government Hierarchy: Electoral Turnover and Intra-Governmental Cooperation," SocArXiv xuvjc, Center for Open Science.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:oup:jleorg:v:35:y:2019:i:3:p:544-578.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    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.