Strategic Appointments

This article develops an institutional spatial theory of presidentialappointments to administrative agencies that falls within thespirit of a recent line of theoretical research toward an institutionaltheory of the presidency. We show that when bureaucrats implementpolicy that results from negotiation with constituents, theally principle—appointing political allies—holdsonly as a knife-edge condition. Presidents are better servedby appointing administrators whose preferences partially offsetthe influence of organized interests. The incentives describedhave implications for the selection of a whole range of bureaucraticpersonnel at various levels, generating significant implicationsfor the study of public management on issues such as personneladministration, representative bureaucracy, and the devolutionof administrative authority.     

Social choice with procedural preferences

Participants in an aggregation procedure have preferences not only over outcomes but also over procedural features (such as preferring consensus, preferring to be in the majority, preferring not having to compromise, etc.) Such procedural preferences can be expressed in a framework that, contrary to the traditional Arrovian framework, has voting patterns rather than outcomes as comparison classes. The extended framework helps us to resolve several of the puzzles of social choice theory. The (more or less anti-democratic) political conclusions that some author have been willing to draw from results in the Arrovian framework are shown to rely on formal restrictions that are present in that framework but not in the extended framework that is presented here.     

Horizontal Inequities in the German Tax-Benefit-System: The Case of Two Wage-Earner Employee Households

The question of how horizontal equity between families in the tax-benefit-system is affected by the within-household distribution of earnings has not been systematically analyzed so far. Using an arithmetic model accounting for all relevant parts of the German tax-benefit-system we explored this aspect in detail. From our calculations it became evident that the combined burden of taxes, social security contributions, and transfers was significantly affected by the distribution of earnings between spouses and that the effect differs with respect to total household income. Overall, the German tax-benefit-system favors an unequal income distribution within the household. Applying the model on empirical data taken from the most recent German Income and Expenditure Survey, we were able to quantify these effects. According to our results, total disposable income of the households analyzed would increase by about €5.5 billion per year if all wage income within households would be allocated to a single-earner.