Citizens' information and the size of bureaucracy

This paper analyzes, in a traditional public choice perspective, the political-bureaucratic relationship starting from the idea that citizens' information is a random variable whose distribution can change because of institutional elements. As in Niskanen's model, we assume that political preferences represent citizens’ preferences, but unlike the traditional theory we consider a stochastic political demand function whose variables are the quantity of the public good and a random variable representing the available citizens' information on the public good. Additionally, political competition as well as mass media competition can affect the distribution of the information. Using the Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970) theory, we show that the size of bureaucratic activity decreases as the dispersion of information among citizens increases, thus improving the efficiency of the system