The three A's of government formation: appointment, allocation, and assignment

Dewan, Torun and Hortala-Vallve, Rafael ORCID: 0000-0002-9677-497X (2009) The three A's of government formation: appointment, allocation, and assignment. PSPE working papers (07-2009). Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

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Abstract

How does the Prime Minister organize her government so that she can implement her policy agenda? In our model, a popularly elected Prime Minister appoints individuals to her cabinet, allocates their portfolios, and assigns their policy tasks - that is, she decides the relevant jurisdiction of departments. Upon appointment ministers obtain expertise on policies specic to their jurisdiction and strategically communicate this information to the Prime Minister before a policy is implemented. Assignment allows the Prime Minister to implement her agenda even when she is constrained to appoint ministers whose policy preferences are far from her own. There are normative implications: an open leadership contest for the position of Prime Minister produces policies that are Pareto efficient and when a Condorcet winning policy exists it is implemented with certainty. We explore the minimal costs of re-assigning policy tasks and show that in a reasonably large government these are negligible. We provide comparative statics on the relationship between cabinet personnel and the assignment of their policy tasks.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Official URL:	http://www2.lse.ac.uk/government/PSPE/WorkingPaper...
Additional Information:	© 2009 The Authors
Divisions:	Government STICERD
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Date Deposited:	10 Sep 2009 12:53
Last Modified:	15 Nov 2024 09:24
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/25152

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