The unelected hand? Bureaucratic influence and electoral accountability

What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good, sharing the voters’ preferences over policies, or bad,
intent on enacting policies that favor special interests. Our analysis identifies the conditions under which good bureaucrats choose to support, oppose, or force pandering. When bureaucrats wield significant influence over policy decisions, good politicians lose their incentives to pander, a shift that ultimately benefits voters. An intermediate level of bureaucratic influence over policymaking can be voter-optimal: large enough to prevent pandering but small enough to avoid granting excessive influence to potentially bad bureaucrats.

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization following peer review. The version of record: Simón Lodato, Christos Mavridis, Federico Vaccari, The unelected hand? Bureaucratic influence and electoral accountability, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2026;, ewag003, is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewag003