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Francesco Giovannoni, Deliberate Discretion?: The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy, The Economic Journal, Volume 114, Issue 493, February 2004, Pages F149–F154, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0013-0133.2004.191_6.x
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Huber and Shipan’s book tackles an important issue for the understanding of the relationship between politicians and the state bureaucracy in determining policy decisions. This issue has received a significant amount of attention in political science literature but has so far not been tackled in the economics literature. Taking into account the explosion of the literature on political economy, this is rather surprising since it is clear that any understanding of the policy making process should be a crucial question for anyone interested in the relationship between political institutions and economic outcomes. In the light of this, I believe it is useful to provide a brief overview of the literature as it stands to emphasise the book’s specific contributions.
There is an increasing interest amongst economists on the question of whether collective decision making should be allocated to politicians who are accountable to citizens as a whole or to expert bureaucrats. In the past, this question has been very narrowly focused on the issue of central bank independence, the argument being that monetary policy be allocated to an agency which is immune from political accountability so that the time‐inconsistency problem does not arise. (Kydland and Prescott, 1977; Barro and Gordon, 1983). Very recently, however, the literature has begun to look at the broader issue. Maskin and Tirole (2001) and Alesina and Tabellini (2003) consider the trade‐off between bureaucrats and politicians in much greater generality and show how the choice depends on different factors: for example, politicians should be in charge whenever policies do not require too much expertise while bureaucrats are preferable whenever there is a risk that large majorities or powerful interest groups may exercise excessive influence on politicians.
