TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alesina,Alberto
AU  - Tabellini,Guido
TI  - Why Do Politicians Delegate?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11531
PY  - 2005
Y2  - August 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11531
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11531.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto F. Alesina
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center 210
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-8388
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: aalesina@harvard.edu

Guido Tabellini
IGIER Universita' Bocconi
Via Roentgen 1
20136 Milano
Italy
Tel: 39 2 583 6 3305; fax 3302
E-Mail: guido.tabellini@unibocconi.it
AB  - Opportunistic politicians maximize the probability of reelection and rents from office holding. Can it be optimal from their point of view to delegate policy choices to independent bureaucracies? The answer is yes: politicians will delegate some policy tasks, though in general not those that would be socially optimal to delegate. In particular, politicians tend not to delegate coalition forming redistributive policies and policies that create large rents or effective campaign contributions. Instead they prefer to delegate risky policies to shift risk (and blame) on bureaucracies.
ER  -