In: Economics
Should members of Congress (1) vote their consciences; OR (2) follow the will of the people who elected them to office; OR (3) follow the voting recommendations of the leaders of their political party? Explain your answer
- The traditional perspective on the part of government in a market economy is that the government is attempting to maximize social welfare. It is an exogenous agent acting to address market failures and its job is to give a legal, regulatory and institutional framework. To do this, it defines: the political standards required for decision-making; the financial principles, for example, those concerning property rights and the guidelines for contracts, enabling exchanges to take place. Notwithstanding, there are currently many speculations which have been advanced to explain how political and monetary decisions are actually taken and you may go over these in the literature, so we will make reference to some of them quickly.
- In these new speculations, government isn't taken to be a single, exogenous substance, yet is seen as an aggregate type of various legislative and institutional gatherings, for example, bureaucrats and political parties, each of which has its own arrangement of destinations.
- These speculations may assist us with understanding why certain strategies are in place, and why others, which are more desirable from a financial point of view, are not attractive to strategy makers.
- One of the main models is the rational choice model, which is based on the idea that the individual actors in the decision-making measure act rationally and are trying to achieve their own aims in rivalry with each other. We will concentrate on this model later in this part.
- At the opposite finish of the range is the systems model, which treats the entire social framework as the basic unit for analysis and is worried about how the segment parts of the framework react to the constraints of the framework.
- One example of this is the neo-Marxist approach where the state and the economy are seen as an arrangement of relationships. The state is in a contradictory situation as it needs both to spend to achieve its aims and to control its spending. In this model there may be close links between the state bureaucracy and the industries needing regulating, which may be reflected in the choice of strategy instruments.
- State sponsorships may well be picked as the appropriate instrument, as these won't cause clashes between the bureaucracy and the regulated industry.
- In the middle of the rational choice and the systems models is the institutions model. Here the emphasis is placed on the institutions in place in the general public and their influence on the gatherings pursuing environmental aims. The institutions in the public eye affect which strategies are probably going to be actualized.
- One example of an institution is the capitalist corporation, and in the institutions approach, the cutting edge corporation may have distinctive long haul aims from the neoclassical benefit maximizing firm of the rational choice model. It may favor certainty of future operations to benefit maximization and accordingly lean toward command-and-control instruments which are bound to stabilize the market. At the end of the day, the institutional factors affect the targets of polluters.
- These factors vary among nations and may assist with explaining why various instruments are favored by various nations.