Elections, the curse of competence and credence policies

Hans Gersbach

Public Choice, 2021, vol. 186, issue 3, No 16, 511 pages

Abstract: Abstract A returning political phenomenon is the impact of “office seekers” in democracies. We examine the consequences when the public faces a new type of two-dimensional uncertainty: whether a politician is competent, and whether a politician is concerned about the consequences of public utility decisions (statesman) or about public opinion (office seeker). We identify new timing distortions, as both competent and incompetent office seekers may take hasty or excessively delayed decisions in order to imitate statesmen or competent office holders. Thus, the public may benefit by disregarding the candidates’ competence and by reelecting candidates based solely on its belief as to whether a politician is a statesman. This “curse of competence” may explain why politicians are so concerned about being perceived as statesmen and why we may expect the largest distortions for credence policies.

Keywords: Office seekers; Statesmen; Curse of competence; Credence policies; Double-sided asymmetric information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D80 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11127-019-00753-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:186:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s11127-019-00753-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-019-00753-w

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().