Political Accountability and Real Authority of Government Bureaucracy
Abstract: In a country with weak institutional constraints on the executive, the real power might belong to the government bureaucracy rather than to an autocratic leader. We combine the Aghion-Tirole definition of formal and real authority and Barro-Ferejohn model of political agency to study the relationship between accountability of elected officials and the extent to which their subordinate bureaucrats have real decision-making power. Normatively, we show that the lower is the level of political accountability; the lower should be the level of real authority at the bottom of the government hierarchy. Positively, we distinguish between different accountability - bureaucratization political regimes.
