Electoral Accountability and Responsive Democracy

John Duggan () and Cesar Martinelli
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John Duggan: Department of Political Science, University of Rochester

No 1057, Working Papers from George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science

Abstract: We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that office holders mix between “taking it easy†and “going for broke†in the first period. Even in the presence of a finite horizon, we establish that increasing office motivation leads to arbitrarily high expected policy outcomes. We conclude that the mechanism of electoral accountability has the potential to achieve responsiveness of democratic politics when electoral incentives are sufficiently large.

Pages: 28
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Journal Article: Electoral Accountability and Responsive Democracy (2020)
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