Candidate Quality

Panu Poutvaara and Tuomas Takalo

No CESifo Working Paper No. 1106, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich

Abstract: We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high. The model accommodates a variety of extensions of which we study costly primaries, two-stage signalling, and ideological differences.

Keywords: politicians' competence, career concerns, campaigning costs, rewards for elected officials; citizen-candidate models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D72 D79 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cesifo-group.de/DocCIDL/cesifo1_wp1106.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Candidate Quality (2004)
Working Paper: Candidate Quality (2004)
Journal Article: Candidate quality (2007)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1106

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich
Address: Poschingerstrasse 5, 81679 Munich
Series data maintained by Julio Saavedra ().