Bureaucrats under Populism

Are Bureaucrats Really Paid Like Bureaucrats?∗

Traditionally, bureaucrats are viewed as a stereotypical example of employees with flat pay schedules and low-powered incentive schemes. This paper challenges this view by providing evidence that wages of a particular group of senior bureaucrats city managers are tightly connected to their performance. In particular, salaries of city managers are strongly linked to city growth. Additional tests...

Contests among Bureaucrats

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the bureaucrats. This paper characterizes the Nash equilibria in lobbying and shows in which way exogenously x...

Rise of populism

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...

A Political Theory of Populism

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians r...