Law enforcement with rent-seeking government under voting pressure

Abstract

This paper investigates how political accountability with voting pressure disciplines rent-seeking behaviors of the government (i.e., fine revenue maximization) by incorporating a two-period retrospective voting model into a law enforcement setting. For minor/major crimes where the pure rent-seeking enforcement is too strict/weak, the democratic process that provides disciplining incentives (e.g., lower discount rates, higher political rents, and fewer forgone collected fines the government must give up in exchange for reelection) makes the rent-seeking government weaken/strengthen enforcement. However, such discipline can still be insufficient and cause inefficient consequences. Additionally, for intermediate crimes, the democratic process can lead to the government’s inefficient pandering to voters and cause welfare deterioration, even compared to the pure rent-seeking enforcement case. The result shows that different types of distortions happen from previous studies when we consider the conflict between the rent-seeking government and citizens.