Politicians’ motivation, political culture, and electoral competition

Klaas Beniers and Robert Dur

International Tax and Public Finance, 2007, vol. 14, issue 1, 29-54

Abstract: We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave opportunistically if other politicians are more likely to behave opportunistically. A political culture may therefore be self-reinforcing and multiple equilibria may arise. We also show that politicians’ incentives to behave opportunistically increase with politicians’ pay and with polarization of policy preferences. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007

Keywords: Politicians’ motivation; Politicians’ pay; Political culture; Electoral competition; Coalition governments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10797-006-8878-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Politicians' Motivation, Political Culture, and Electoral Competition (2005)
Working Paper: Politicians’ Motivation, Political Culture, and Electoral Competition (2004)
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:kap:itaxpf:v:14:y:2007:i:1:p:29-54

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10797/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10797-006-8878-y

Access Statistics for this article

International Tax and Public Finance is currently edited by Ronald B. Davies and Kimberly Scharf

More articles in International Tax and Public Finance from Springer, International Institute of Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().