How Do Policy-Makers really Solve Problems? Evidence from the French Local Public Sector
Résumé
This paper examines how policy-makers solve problems in representative democracies. It is argued in particular that politicians cannot adopt an exhaustive search of all possible policies. Instead, they might use an incremental strategy such as the problem-solving heuristic called hill-climbing. The article formalizes both possibilities using the median voter model as its foundation. Corresponding models are afterwards estimated on the whole set of French départements. The results of the estimations lead to the conclusion that the past has an influence on the present public expenditure decisions, which is an argument in favor of the hill-climbing model.