PRUDENCE AND SUCCESS IN POLITICS

Olivier Cadot and Bernard Sinclair‐desgagné
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné ()

Economics and Politics, 1992, vol. 4, issue 2, 171-189

Abstract: The paper considers a repeated election game between an infinitely‐lived representative voter and finitely‐lived, heterogeneous politicians. The voter's prior belief about the incumbent's competency is updated during the incumbent's first term in office. The voter's problem is to find a rule that simultaneously selects and controls politicians. We show that the simple performance rule, standard in the literature, is justified as a time‐consistent rule for a forward‐looking voter. The outcome of a large class of perfect equilibria is “strategic caution”: incumbent politicians slow down the voter's Bayesian learning by taking only weakly informative actions.

Date: 1992
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