Selection of Public Servants into Politics

Thomas Braendle and Alois Stutzer

Working papers from Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Basel

Abstract: Countries differ substantially in how they deal with politicians that come from the public sector. Most constitutions include incompatibility and ineligibility rules due to concerns about conflicts of interest and the politicization of the public service. We study how these rules affect the attractiveness of parliamentary mandates for public servants and thus the selection into politics. We compile a novel dataset that captures the fraction of public servants in 71 national legislatures as well as the respective (in)compatibility regimes. On average, there are 7 percentage points fewer public servants in parliaments where a strict regime is in force. Supplementary evidence shows that the fraction of public servants in parliament is positively correlated with government consumption as well as the absence of corruption.

Keywords: Political selection; public servants; incompatibility; political representation; corruption; government consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 K39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://edoc.unibas.ch/18788/1/Braendle_Stutzer_Se ... litics_18_5_2011.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Selection of public servants into politics (2016)
Working Paper: Selection of Public Servants into Politics (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bsl:wpaper:2011/06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Basel Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WWZ ().