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side payments to compensate the losers are desirable and relevant or bundling of policies is crucial to
obtain majorities in parliament. Epstein and O’Halloran (1999) argue that the degree of delegation is
chosen so as to maximise the benefit to politicians. Alesina and Tabellini argue that then politicians want
to keep those tasks that generate substantial rents, campaign contributions and/or bribes and all kinds of
redistributive tasks. However, Fiorina (1977) points out that politicians are happy to delegate tasks that
have a high risk of policy failure so that bureaucrats can be blamed. Monetary policy requires
sophisticated skills, has relatively few distributional effects and suffers from time inconsistency
problems. Also, the electorate’s preferences for low inflation are stable and not controversial and
recessions can be blamed on central bankers. As in Rogoff (1985), there is a clear-cut case for delegating
monetary policy to an independent central bank. Similar arguments apply to regulation of utilities. In
contrast, foreign policy should not be delegated to bureaucrats as preferences change a lot and it is
difficult to ex ante specify the goals. Redistributive policy should not be delegated either, since
politicians may want to capture some of the associated rents.
How about delegation of cultural policy? Which tasks in the domain of cultural policy should be
given to the Minister of Culture, parliamentarians, bureaucrats and art experts? Many of the insights of
the theory of delegation apply. Politicians are motivated by being popular and winning elections in the
short run. Bureaucrats at the Ministry of Culture are motivated by career concerns and have a longer-term
perspective. Art experts are motivated by their standing and reputation with their peers in the cultural
sector. They also want to be seen to be independent of political pressure. Cultural subsidies generate
substantial rents. Many politicians like to be seen to be a patron of the arts and around election time are
happy to call on ‘friends’ in the arts to lend their theatres and call on them for help during the campaign.
Judging which theatre company deserves subsidy requires sophisticated knowledge and many visits in
order to judge properly. Since there is also the danger of state art, politicians should stay away from
judging the merits of individual artistic expressions. They are unsuited to decide on the exact allocation
of funds. This is better done by bureaucrats who make use of the advice of expert judgement on artistic
quality. Many politicians do not resist the temptation to interfere in the allocation of funds to please
electoral lobbies and engage in redistribution from, say, the rich metropolis to culture-starved regions.
This is particularly prevalent in a system with ministerial responsibility. There often is huge pressure
from the parliament to focus at short-term benefits of cultural subsidies with no concern for the long run.
Building a new theatre or opera house generates short-term prestige, but without making funds available
for ambitious programming it is unclear whether it will contribute to a thriving cultural climate. The
making of cultural policy suffers from very serious time inconsistency problems. This should not be
mistaken for varying or unstable cultural preferences. The normative reasons (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5)
described above thus strongly argue in favour of the arms’ length principle in the making of cultural