Abstract:
There has been a long debate about the two poles of government behaviour, benevolent vs selfish. In this paper, a theoretical model is used for evaluating the chances of an office- motivated government to push for unpopular policy measures that the government would like to pursue for moral reasons (e.g. green transition, gay rights, support of Ukraine). We obtain multiple equilibria that are sensitive to pre-existing conditions and to the ability of the government to affect the narrative about the desired policy measure.