The Politician and the Judge: Accountability in Government By ERIC MASKIN AND JEAN TIROLE* We build a simple model to capture the major virtues and drawbacks of making public officials accountable (i.e., subjecting them to reelection): On the one hand, accountability allows the public to screen and discipline their officials; on the other, it may induce those officials to pander to public opinion and put too little weight on minority welfare. We study when decision-making powers should be allocated to the public directly (direct democracy) , to accountable officials (called “politicians”) , or to nonaccountable officials (called “judges”). (JEL H1, H7, K4) The premise behind democracy is that public decisions should reflect the will of the people. But in most democracies, comparatively few decisions are made directly by the public. 1 More often, the power to decide is delegated to representatives. And there is a good reason for this delegation: representatives are usually ex- pected to do a better job. 2 As specialists in public decision-making, they are more likely than the average citizen to have the experience, judgment, and information to decide wisely. 3 In any case, they have greater incentive than the citizen to try to do so. After all, in any large society, a lone citizen will have strong tempta- tion to free-ride, since her chance of actually affecting policy is almost negligible. 4 Another potential advantage of representative government is that it reduces the risk of “tyr- anny by the majority.” Noting the dangers of direct democracy, 5 Madison (1787) writes: “It is of great importance ... to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a * Maskin: Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540, and Princeton University (e-mail: maskin@ias.edu); Tirole: Institut d’Economie Industrielle, Manufacture des Tabacs, Bureau MF529-Bat. F, 21 allees de Brienne, 31000 Toulouse, France, and GREMAQ (UMR 5603 CNRS), Toulouse, CERAS (URA 2036 CNRS), Paris, and MIT (e-mail: tirole@cict.fr). We are grateful to the participants of the CEPR-ESF conference on “The Institu- tions of Restraint” (Toulouse, June 24 –28, 2000), the An- nual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society (Paris, April 18 –22, 2001), the Southeastern International Trade and Economic Theory Conference (Miami, November 16 – 18, 2001), the Canadian Economic Theory Conference (To- ronto, May 24 –26, 2002), the Modeling the Constitution Conference (Pasadena, May 16 –17, 2003), and many sem- inars for their observations on oral presentations, and to Mathias Dewatripont, John Matsusaka, Stephen Morris, Ian Shapiro, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on previous drafts. 1 Ballot referendums constitute the largest class of deci- sions made through direct democracy, but even in the United States and Switzerland, where they are especially popular, they touch on only a small fraction of public policy issues. 2 See, however, the sympathetic 14-page survey on di- rect democracy in The Economist (December 21, 1996). Many have argued that once the digital divide is eliminated, e-voting will enhance the appeal of referendums. 3 The view that governments are better informed than citizens is emphasized in James Madison (1787) and Abbe ´ Sie ´ye `s (1789) (see also the introduction to Bernard Manin, 1997). 4 Joseph Schumpeter (1942) puts it in characteristically acerbic fashion: “The average citizen expends less disci- plined effort on mastering a political problem than he ex- pends on a game of bridge.” 5 Summarizing the case against direct democracy, David Butler and Austin Ranney (1994, pp. 17–18) write: The main arguments against holding referendums in representative democracies include: (1) ordinary cit- izens have neither the analytical skills nor the infor- mation to make wise decisions; (2) decisions by elected officials involve weighing the intensity of preferences and melding the legitimate interests of many groups into policies that will give all groups something of what they want; (3) decisions made by representatives are more likely to protect the rights of minorities; and (4) by allowing elected officials to be bypassed and by encouraging officials to evade divisive issues by passing them on to the voters, referendums weaken the prestige and authority of representatives and representative government. We have already touched on points (1) and (3), and these will figure prominently in our analysis. 1034