Private Agenda and Re-Election Incentives

Javier Rivas

No 14/13, Department of Economics Working Papers from University of Bath, Department of Economics

Abstract: Consider a politician who has to take several decisions during his term in office. For each decision, the politician faces a trade-off between taking what he believes to be the right choice, thus increasing his chances of re-election, and taking the decision that increases his private gain but is likely to decrease his chances of re-election. Within this setting, we consider how different factors affect the incentives of the politician to take the right choice. In our results we find, among others, that the behavior such that the politician follows his private interests in the first periods of his term in office and then tries to please the electorate when elections approach is optimal if and only if he has either very high or very low decision making skills. Furthermore, we find that it is not true that a more demanding electorate produces more socially motivated politicians.

Date: 2013-11-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://purehost.bath.ac.uk/ws/files/22934651/Priv ... ction_Incentives.pdf Final published version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Private agenda and re-election incentives (2016)
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:eid:wpaper:37903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from University of Bath, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scholarly Communications Librarian ().