Voters and Representatives: How Should Representatives Be Selected?

Thomas Braendle and Alois Stutzer

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: Institutions systematically affect which individuals gain positions in the different branches of democratic government. Given agents' discretion in decision-making, their characteristics matter for policy choices. This perspective of political selection replaces the representative political agent by a heterogeneous set of political decision makers with different skills and motivations. Selecting political agents becomes a means to align the interests of the elected delegates with those of the citizens. Our comparative analysis reviews demand- and supplyside conditions in the market for competent and honest politicians. On the demand side, parties and electoral rules (including reservations and quotas) play an important role in determining who is recruited, nominated and finally elected. On the supply side, we focus on the various types of compensations associated with political office. Finally, institutions affecting the attractiveness of a political mandate for people with a specific professional background are considered and related to policy outcomes.

Keywords: Political selection; electoral rules; political parties; paying politicians; incompatibility; citizen-candidates model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2017-05.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2017-05.htm Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
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:cra:wpaper:2017-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).