Reputational Dynamics and Political Careers

Scott Ashworth

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2005, vol. 21, issue 2, 441-466

Abstract: I study a model of repeated elections with both symmetric learning about candidate ability and moral hazard. In this model, candidates choose how to allocate their resources between constituency service and policy work. Early in their careers, they devote excessive time to constituency service in an attempt to manipulate voter learning. Since voters use elections to select better candidates, incumbents become more confident of reelection over time and reduce the distortion in their effort allocations. I embed the basic model in a common agency framework to study seniority norms in legislative organization. The model organizes many of the stylized facts about elections and congressional organization, including retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, the dynamics of effort allocation over a career, the importance of constituency service, and seniority norms in committee assignments. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewi015 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:jleorg:v:21:y:2005:i:2:p:441-466

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is currently edited by Andrea Prat

More articles in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().