Electoral control and the human capital of politicians

Peter Buisseret and Carlo Prato ()

Games and Economic Behavior, 2016, vol. 98, issue C, 34-55

Abstract: We develop a model of electoral control in which politicians in a legislative body allocate their time between providing constituency services to their voters, and pursuing the objectives of legislative cliques and factions. While a politician's human capital symmetrically increases his inherent ability to engage in both endeavors, our analysis uncovers an equilibrium bias towards the latter. As a result of the strategic interdependencies among legislators, a trade-off arises between politicians' human capital and voters' ability to exert electoral control. We characterize conditions under which an increase in the human capital of politicians makes voters worse off by encouraging all politicians to divert their attention away from their constituents.

Keywords: Electoral control; Competence; Political representation; Multidistrict elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825616300276
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:98:y:2016:i:c:p:34-55

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2016.04.011

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().