Bureaucrats or Politicians? Part II: Multiple policy tasks

Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates \u85rst the normative criteria with which to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non elected bureaucrats. Politicians are preferable if there is un-certainty about social preferences and exibility is valuable, or if policy complementarities and compensation of losers is impor-tant. Bureaucrats are preferable if time inconsistency and short-termism is an issue, or if vested interests have large stakes in the policy outcome. We then compare this normative benchmark with the case in which politicians choose when to delegate and show that the two generally di¤er. JEL classi\u85cations: H1 E00 K00