The Political Economy of Technocratic Governments

This paper proposes the first game theoretical model of technocratic governments, i.e. cases where a non political technocrat is put in charge by political parties. Based on the literature on post-electoral politics and agenda setting, we show conditions for the existence of a technocratic government equilibrium, where both parties agree to delegate the agenda setting power to technocrats, committed to maximize social welfare. Such an equilibrium exists only if the technocrats have a superior competence with respect to the majority party/coalition, or if the country is in a sufficiently important economic crisis. Furthermore, it is more likely to exist in countries with unstable parliament (i.e. one where the governing coalition is not always able to impose its will) and where parties care about the common value dimension, vis-a-vis the ideological one. Finally, we show that polarization increases the set of parameters where the technocratic government equilibrium exists, when parliament is unstable.