The Effect of Party Discipline on the Electoral Accountability of Politicians

Nicolas-Guillaume Martineau ()

Cahiers de recherche from Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke

Abstract: This essay examines the influence of a politician's party on her accountability to the electorate. It also considers what the conjectured waning of political parties may imply for the effectiveness of elections in disciplining politicians, and for voter welfare. The paper models the election mechanism as a principal-agent relationship between the representative voter (principal) and the politician in office (agent). The party is heterogeneous, composed of factions whose preferences over policy differ. It may coerce the politician by threatening to remove her from the party's helm following certain policy choices. The main result is that putschist threats, despite being a distortion when the electoral mechanism is functioning well, can be welfare-enhancing in the presence of another distortion on the electoral mechanism. This serves to contribute to a theory of the political second-best.

Keywords: political agency; factions; accountability; political parties; ideology; voter welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 D72 H10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2012-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:shr:wpaper:12-04

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