IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mpg/wpaper/2005_02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der Regierung (Governmental Public Relations)

Author

Listed:
  • Christoph Engel

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany)

Abstract

Should government be allowed to spend tax payers’ money on public relations? If one frames the question that way, the negative answer suggests itself. Yet government communication serves more purposes. These purposes may be analysed in terms of behavioural economics and psychology. In moral suasion, government communication is the governance tool itself. Most other governance tools do not automatically reach their addressees. Appropriate communication is necessary for them to become effective. Finally, government is a legitimate player in political process, and communication to the public is a legitimate element of this process. Specifically, the normatively desirable and the normative problematic aspects can usually not be fully disentangled. Hence, the potential distortion of elections must be outweighed against the governance effect. This paper does so by interpreting governmental public relations as a bundled product. It models the people as the principal, and the political parties running government as the agent. The distortion effect is observable, the governance effect is not. This set-up of the model invites a second-best solution in terms of mechanism design. Government is free to advertise. But advertising is costly in that it generates a handicap at the next elections. This solution is taken as a benchmark for discussing politically more digestible third and forth best alternatives.

Suggested Citation

  • Christoph Engel, 2005. "Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der Regierung (Governmental Public Relations)," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2005_2, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
  • Handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2005_02
    Note: German text
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2005_02online.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Governmental Public Relations; Governmental Communication; Mechanism Design; Constitutional Law;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    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:mpg:wpaper:2005_02. 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: Marc Martin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mppggde.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.