IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v55y2011i3p610-627.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Three As of Government Formation: Appointment, Allocation, and Assignment

Author

Listed:
  • Torun Dewan
  • Rafael Hortala‐Vallve

Abstract

How does the Prime Minister organize her government so that she can implement her policy agenda? In our model, a Prime Minister appoints individuals to her cabinet, allocates their portfolios, and assigns their policy tasks—that is, she decides the relevant jurisdiction of departments and the type of proposals a minister can make. Upon appointment, ministers obtain expertise on policies specific 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. A Prime Minister weakly prefers a diverse cabinet. In equilibrium, the Prime Minister is indifferent between delegating policy or implementing policy herself.

Suggested Citation

  • Torun Dewan & Rafael Hortala‐Vallve, 2011. "The Three As of Government Formation: Appointment, Allocation, and Assignment," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 55(3), pages 610-627, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:55:y:2011:i:3:p:610-627
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00519.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00519.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00519.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Habermacher, 2022. "Information Aggregation in Multidimensional Cheap Talk," Working Papers 169, Red Nacional de Investigadores en Economía (RedNIE).
    2. Goodhart, Lucy, 2013. "Who Decides? Coalition Governance and Ministerial Discretion," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 8(3), pages 205-237, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:55:y:2011:i:3:p:610-627. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.