IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/2113.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Analyzing the case for government intervention in a representative democracy

Author

Listed:
  • Besley, Timothy
  • Coate, Stephen

Abstract

The welfare economic method for analyzing the case for government intervention is often critized for ignoring the political determination of policies. The standard method of accounting for this critique studies the case for intervention under the constraint that the level of the instrument in question will be politically determined. We critize this method for its implicit assumption that new interventions will not affect the level of existing policy instruments. We argue that this assumption is particularly misleading in suggesting that political economy concerns must dampen the case for intervention.

Suggested Citation

  • Besley, Timothy & Coate, Stephen, 1997. "Analyzing the case for government intervention in a representative democracy," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 2113, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:2113
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/2113/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Julián Costas-Fernández & Simón Lodato, 2022. "Inequality, poverty and the composition of redistribution," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 59(4), pages 925-967, November.
    2. Diermeier, Daniel & Merlo, Antonio, 2004. "An empirical investigation of coalitional bargaining procedures," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(3-4), pages 783-797, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Government intervention; public choice;

    JEL classification:

    • H10 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - General
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods

    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:ehl:lserod:2113. 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: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    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.