Political MotivationsReview of Economic Studies, 2008, vol. 75, issue 3, pages 671-697 Abstract: Are politicians motivated by policy outcomes or by the perks of office? To shed light on this important question, I develop a simple model of two candidate electoral competitions in which candidates may be either "office" or "policy motivated". In a second departure from standard formulations, the model incorporates both campaign and post-election behaviour of candidates. In this environment, I find that office-motivated candidates are favoured in electoral competition but that their advantage is limited by the electoral mechanism itself and policy-motivated candidates win a significant fraction of elections. More importantly, I show that the competitive interaction among candidates of different motivations affects the incentives of "all" candidates-both office and policy motivated-and that this competition affects policy outcomes. I also extend the model to explore the decision of citizens to enter politics and show that in all equilibria policy-motivated citizens compose a majority of the candidate pool. Copyright © 2008 The Review of Economic Studies Limited. Date: 2008 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:restud:v:75:y:2008:i:3:p:671-697 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Review of Economic Studies is edited by Andrea Prat, Bruno Biais, Kjetil Storesletten and Enrique Sentana More articles in Review of Economic Studies from Blackwell Publishing |
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