Durable Policy, Political Accountability, and Active Waste
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The policy choices of governments are frequently durable. From the building of bridges to the creation of social programs, investments in public infrastructure typically last well beyond a single electoral cycle. In this paper we develop a dynamic model of repeated elections in which policy choices are durable. The behavior that emerges in equilibrium reveals a novel mechanism through which durability interacts with the shorter electoral cycle and distorts the incentives of politicians. We find that a government that is electorally accountable nevertheless underinvests in policy, that it deliberately wastes investment on projects that are never implemented, and that the type of policy it implements is itself Pareto inefficient. The first two distortions match evidence from infrastructure policy in western democracies, and the third identifies a distortion that has heretofore not been explored empirically. Notably, these effects emerge solely due to the interaction of policy durability and political accountability, and not from corruption, poor decision making, or voter myopia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".