Political centralization and government accountability--论文代写范文精选

在独立公投时,苏格兰政府发表了一份指南，制定独立的情况。亚历克斯萨尔蒙德总理认为,苏格兰应该变得独立,不同于不列颠群岛的其他部分,苏格兰独立，这将不再是可能的政府当选,追求政策对苏格兰的意愿。下面的政治paper代写范文进行阐述。

Abstract 
This paper explains why decentralization can undermine accountability and answers three questions: what determines if power should be centralized or decentralized when regions are heterogeneous? How many levels of government should there be? How should state borders be drawn? We develop a model of political agency in which voters di§er in their ability to monitor rent-seeking politicians. We Önd that rent extraction is a decreasing and convex function of the share of informed voters, because voter information improves monitoring but also reduces the appeal of holding o¢ ce. As a result, information heterogeneity pushes toward centralization to reduce rent extraction. Taste heterogeneity pulls instead toward decentralization to match local preferences. Our model thus implies that optimal borders should cluster by tastes but ensure diversity of information. We also Önd economies of scope in accountability that explain why multiplying government tiers harms e¢ ciency. A single government in charge of many policies has better incentives than many special-purpose governments splitting its budget and responsibilities. Hence, a federal system is desirable only if information varies enough across regions.

Introduction 
In the run-up to Scotlandís 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish Government published a guide setting out its case for independence. Alex Salmond, the premier, argued that Scotland ought to become independent because its people are di§erent from those of other parts of the British Isles and thus need a di§erent government of their own. ìAfter Scotland becomes independent ... the people of Scotland are in charge. It will no longer be possible for governments to be elected and pursue policies against the wishes of the Scottish peopleî (Salmond 2013, p. x-xi). The Scottish leaderís argument Önds support in the standard economic theory of Öscal federalism. 

Its core result is the Decentralization Theorem: absent policy spillovers, decentralization is more e¢ cient than centralization if regions are not identical. This proposition, introduced by Oates (1972), has proved a remarkably general paradigm (Lockwood 2006). Local governments can tailor their choices to the particular conditions of each jurisdiction and thus provide higher social welfare than a single policy adopted by a common government. With no economies of scale, each group with distinct preferences should have an independent government (Tiebout 1956; Bewley 1981). Increasing returns and externalities promote political integration, but heterogeneity raises the downsides of large jurisdictions (Alesina and Spolaore 2003). Political-economy frictions provide rigorous microfoundations for the inability of a central government to match local preferences (Lockwood 2002; Besley and Coate 2003; Harstad 2007). 

Yet, empirical evidence shows that decentralization has not consistently delivered the beneÖts its advocates predicted in theory (Treisman 2007). The majority of Scottish voters that rejected independence in the referendum may have been risk averse, but not unwise. The experience of countries all over the world teaches that decentralization can harm the quality of government just as it can improve it. Mismanagement and lack of accountability are common in local governments, especially in developing and transition economies (Bardhan and Mookherjee 2006). This paper develops a model of political agency that explains why decentralization can reduce accountability and answers three key questions. When regions are heterogeneous, what determines if power should be centralized or decentralized? How many levels of government should there be? How should state borders be drawn? Our theory is grounded on the observation that regions di§er not only in preferencesó the focus of the classic theoryó but also in their ability to monitor elected o¢ cials and hold government accountable. Government accountability varies widely within the United States: o¢ cial corruption in Louisiana and Mississippi is Öve times as prevalent as in Oregon and Washington (Glaeser and Saks 2006).

We study public goods provided by self-interested politicians whose goal is to extract wasteful rents. To keep extracting rents they need to win re-election, so their corruption is constrained by career concerns. Electoral discipline provides both incentives and screening. Politicians di§er in ability and voters try to dismiss unskilled incumbents. Voters infer skill from performance, so politicians are incentivized to refrain from extracting rents because low public-good provision is punished at the polls, whether it stems from incompetence or corruption. Our model has two key features. 

First, we study heterogeneous accountability arising from di§erences in votersíinformation. Some voters correctly observe and understand policy outcomes, while others do not and cannot infer the incumbentís ability. Second, we develop a dynamic model with a recursive incentive structure. The expectation of future electoral discipline a§ects the current trade-o§ between rent extraction and re-election. Thus, a permanent increase in voter information has two e§ects on electoral discipline. On the one hand, it makes re-election more responsive to performance, raising incentives to reduce rents. On the other hand, this very reduction in equilibrium rents lowers the appeal of re-election and thus indirectly dampens the decline in rent extraction. In our model we Önd that the direct e§ect always dominates, but rent extraction falls with voter information at a declining rate because of the countervailing indirect e§ect. 

When monitoring improves starting from a low initial level, politicians react sharply because the value of o¢ ce is high. Further improvements yield lower beneÖts. Our core theoretical insight follows from the concave impact of an informed population on the quality of government. When di§erent regions have di§erent shares of informed voters, centralization reduces aggregate rent extraction. Political integration creates a single electorate with the average share of informed voters. Rent extraction falls sharply in less informed regions, while it does not increase as much in better informed ones. Thus, centralization yields aggregate e¢ ciency gains. However, the distribution of these e¢ ciency gains is problematic. 

A centralized government is more accountable, but disproportionately accountable to the most informed regions. If it enjoys discretion over the geographic distribution of public goods, if favors informed regions and neglects uninformed ones. The resulting misallocation is regressive and so costly that centralization lowers social welfare despite reducing rents. Thus, we Önd that centralization can be welfare-maximizing only if it is accompanied by a uniformity constraint that requires the central government to provide identical public goods to all regions. As a result of this endogenous need for uniformity, heterogeneous information drives a key trade o§. Centralization improves accountability, but it foregoes the ability to match local public goods to idiosyncratic local preferences. Section 3 analyzes this trade o§ and answers.

our motivating question: should government be decentralized when regions are di§erent? The answer depends on what type of heterogeneity is starkest. Di§erences in tastes pull toward decentralization; di§erences in information push toward centralization instead. Empirical evidence supports our results. Without a uniformity constraint, politicians allocate spending across regions in response to voter information rather than actual needs (Strˆmberg 2004). With uniformity, instead, centralization mainly beneÖts the uninformed: reforms decentralizing public education in Argentina and Italy had regressive e§ects and worsened inequality (Galiani, Gertler and Schargrodsky 2008; Durante, Labartino and Perotti 2014). Our prediction that centralization improves government accountability is consistent with American history. 

Two former state governorsó Don Siegelman of Alabama and Rod Blagojevich of Illinoisó are in prison for corruption. Corruption has long been considered a distinctive plague of city and state governments (Ste§ens 1904; Wilson 1966). Federal intervention during the New Deal eradicated the patronage and political manipulation that had characterized until then state and local welfare programs (Wallis, Fishback, and Kantor 2006). World history o§ers other examples of accountability gains from centralization: in early modern Europe (Besley and Persson 2011; Dincecco 2011), in pre-colonial Africa (Gennaioli and Rainer 2007) and in transition economies (Blanchard and Shleifer 2001). European history also provides direct support for our Önding that heterogeneous accountability prompts centralization. Germany and Italy were uniÖed as nation-states in the late nineteenth century. Italy had highly heterogeneous pre-unitary institutions and became a centralized nation-state. 

Instead, Germany had relatively homogeneous institutional quality and was organized as a federal country. Both regional di§erences in accountability and the degree of centralization remain higher in Italy than Germany today (Ziblatt 2006). In Section 4 we study how many levels of government there should be. The standard logic of Öscal federalism suggests there should be many because every policy should be matched to the right geographic unit. In our framework, however, we Önd that multiplying government tiers is costly because there are economies of scope in accountability. When politicians are responsible for providing a larger set of public goods their incentives improve and they devote a lower share of the budget to rents. Such economies of scope imply that having a single level of government is best if information is homogeneous. 

A federal system can be optimal only if di§erences in information are large enough. Then the federal government provides large accountability gain to poorly informed regions, while their local governments can match their idiosyncratic preferences over policies for which taste heterogeneity is starkest. Our model can thus explain the empirical Önding that government quality declines as the number of government tiers rises. In the United States, the proliferation of overlapping 4 special-purpose local governments in charge of speciÖc policies has been a Öasco (Berry 2009). Special-purpose districts are ine¢ cient and prone to capture by special interests. In Europe, too, multiple sub-national levels of governments have led to ine¢ ciencies, and their reduction and simpliÖcation is now on the agenda. Cross-country evidence shows a robust positive correlation between corruption and the number of levels of government (Fan, Lin, and Treisman 2009). 

Section 5 considers what should determine the boundaries of governments when people are not naturally sorted into internally homogeneous regions. We Önd that optimal borders have two characteristics: they cluster by tastes, but ensure maximum diversity of information. The second goal can trump the Örst when geographic constraints create a tension between the two. A disadvantaged uninformed group should not be a local minority; it should rather join better informed voters with similar preferences in a larger polity. E.g., breaking up California would reduce welfare because educated San Francisco liberals ought to share a state government with working-class left-wingers in the Central Valley. This paper furthers the study of Öscal federalism and the geographic structure of government. 

Starting with Tieboutís (1956) and Oatesís (1972) seminal contributions, prior work focused exclusively on di§erences in preferences. We show that this is only one half of the story. Once we consider also di§erences in voter information across regions, we Önd that the two kinds of heterogeneity have opposite implications on the optimal architecture of government. Di§erences in preferences promote decentralization if the central government cannot tailor policies to local preferences (Oates 1972; Alesina and Spolaore 2003). Assuming that accountability is homogeneous across regions, prior work endogenized the failure of preferencematching under centralization through frictions in political bargaining (Lockwood 2002; Besley and Coate 2003; Harstad 2007). We provide an alternative microfoundation through heterogenous voter information. More important, we show that di§erences in information promote centralization because they entail larger accountability gains from political integration. Our Önding suggests that heterogeneous information is the key reason why centralization can increase accountability. Prior work mainly emphasized instead why accountability can rise with decentralization. In particular, decentralization can help voters monitor their local governments thanks to yardstick competition (Besley and Case 1995), while centralization entails a common-agency problem that makes politicians less accountable to voters in any single region (Seabright 1996).(paper代写)

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