IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/ajrey.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Battle for Credit

Author

Listed:
  • Awad, Emiel
  • Karekurve-Ramachandra, Varun
  • Rothenberg, Lawrence

Abstract

How does blaming and crediting affect the implementation of policies and what are the constraints that reputation-concerned politicians face in commenting about bureaucrats? On one hand, politicians may want to claim credit when things go well and deflect blame when outcomes go awry. On the other, the distribution of blame and credit not only affects the politicians' reputation but also those of bureaucratic agencies and potentially their willingness to work over time. To investigate this tension, we develop and analyze a model where a bureaucrat cares about his reputation vis-a-vis an interested audience, and the politician can blame the bureaucrat for failed policies or give credit for successes via cheap talk. We show that the bureaucrat can be induced to exert more effort through blame and credit, but that the politician is constrained in communication by considerations for future effort and her own reputation concerns.

Suggested Citation

  • Awad, Emiel & Karekurve-Ramachandra, Varun & Rothenberg, Lawrence, 2023. "Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Battle for Credit," SocArXiv ajrey, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:ajrey
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/ajrey
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/642a239f3812071efdff51ec/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/ajrey?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Morris Fiorina, 1982. "Legislative choice of regulatory forms: Legal process or administrative process?," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 39(1), pages 33-66, January.
    2. Hinterleitner, Markus, 2018. "Policy failures, blame games and changes to policy practice," Journal of Public Policy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(2), pages 221-242, June.
    3. Ruder, Alex I., 2014. "Institutional Design and the Attribution of Presidential Control: Insulating the President from Blame," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 9(3), pages 301-335, September.
    4. Björn Bartling & Urs Fischbacher, 2012. "Shifting the Blame: On Delegation and Responsibility," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 79(1), pages 67-87.
    5. Asai, Kentaro & Kawai, Kei & Nakabayashi, Jun, 2021. "Regulatory capture in public procurement: Evidence from revolving door bureaucrats in Japan," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 186(C), pages 328-343.
    6. Yasunari Tamada & Tsung‐Sheng Tsai, 2018. "Reputation versus information: The delegation policy when the principal has reputational concerns," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 20(3), pages 367-389, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Simon Lodato & Christos Mavridis & Federico Vaccari, 2024. "The Unelected Hand? Bureaucratic Influence and Electoral Accountability," Papers 2402.17526, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Argenton, Cédric & Potters, Jan & Yang, Yadi, 2023. "Receiving credit: On delegation and responsibility," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).
    2. Adam Hill, 2015. "Does Delegation Undermine Accountability? Experimental Evidence on the Relationship Between Blame Shifting and Control," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 12(2), pages 311-339, June.
    3. Jiabin Wu, 2018. "Indirect higher order beliefs and cooperation," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 21(4), pages 858-876, December.
    4. Shaul Shalvi & Ivan Soraperra & Joël van der Weele & Marie Claire Villeval, 2019. "Shooting the Messenger? Supply and Demand in Markets for Willful Ignorance," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 19-071/I, Tinbergen Institute.
    5. Lucas C. Coffman & Alexander Gotthard-Real, 2019. "Moral Perceptions of Advised Actions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(8), pages 3904-3927, August.
    6. Ernst Fehr & Holger Herz & Tom Wilkening, 2013. "The Lure of Authority: Motivation and Incentive Effects of Power," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(4), pages 1325-1359, June.
    7. Vetter, Stefan, 2013. "Delegating decision rights for anticipated rewards as an alternative to corruption: An experiment," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 188-204.
    8. Gary Charness & Ramón Cobo-Reyes & Juan A. Lacomba & Francisco Lagos & Jose Maria Perez, 2016. "Social comparisons in wage delegation: experimental evidence," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 19(2), pages 433-459, June.
    9. Mathieu Chevrier & Vincent Teixeira, 2024. "Algorithm Delegation and Responsibility: Shifting Blame to the Programmer?," GREDEG Working Papers 2024-04, Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France, revised Sep 2024.
    10. De Chiara, Alessandro & Engl, Florian & Herz, Holger & Manna, Ester, 2022. "Control Aversion in Hierarchies," FSES Working Papers 527, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland.
    11. Kong, Dongmin & Kong, Gaowen & Liu, Shasha & Zhu, Ling, 2022. "Does competition cause government decentralization? The case of state-owned enterprises," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 1103-1122.
    12. Feess, Eberhard & Schilling, Thomas & Timofeyev, Yuriy, 2023. "Misreporting in teams with individual decision making: The impact of information and communication," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 209(C), pages 509-532.
    13. Behnk, Sascha & Hao, Li & Reuben, Ernesto, 2022. "Shifting normative beliefs: On why groups behave more antisocially than individuals," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    14. Chris Hanretty & Christel Koop, 2013. "Shall the law set them free? The formal and actual independence of regulatory agencies," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 7(2), pages 195-214, June.
    15. Doruk İriş & Jungmin Lee & Alessandro Tavoni, 2015. "Delegation and public pressure in a threshold public goods game: theory and experimental evidence," GRI Working Papers 186, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
    16. Nadine Chlaß & Lata Gangadharan & Kristy Jones, 2023. "Charitable giving and intermediation: a principal agent problem with hidden prices," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 75(4), pages 941-961.
    17. Bendor, Jonathan & Glazer, Ami & Hammond, Thomas H., 2000. "Theories of Delegation in Political Science," Research Papers 1655, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    18. Rockenbach, Bettina & Tonke, Sebastian & Weiss, Arne R., 2021. "Self-serving behavior of the rich causes contagion effects among the poor," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 183(C), pages 289-300.
    19. Kang, Minah & Reich, Michael R., 2014. "Between credit claiming and blame avoidance: The changing politics of priority-setting for Korea's National Health Insurance System," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 115(1), pages 9-17.
    20. Felix Holzmeister & Martin Holmén & Michael Kirchler & Matthias Stefan & Erik Wengström, 2023. "Delegation Decisions in Finance," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(8), pages 4828-4844, August.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:osf:socarx:ajrey. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arabixiv.org .

    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.