Candidate Quality

Panu Poutvaara and Tuomas Takalo

No 1195, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

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.

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 J24 J4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
Date: Written
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Related works:
Working Paper: Candidate Quality (2003)
Working Paper: Candidate Quality (2004)
Journal Article: Candidate quality (2007)
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