Of Candidates and Character

B. Douglas Bernheim and Navin Kartik

No 94, Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science

Abstract: We study the characteristics of self-selected candidates in corrupt political systems. Potential candidates differ along two dimensions of unobservable character: public spirit (altruism toward others) and honesty (the disutility suffered when selling out to special interests after securing office). Both aspects combine to determine an individual's quality as governor. We characterize properties of equilibrium candidate pools for arbitrary costs of running for office. As the cost of running vanishes, there is an essentially unique candidate pool, which is typically highly asymmetric: it consists of only the most dishonest individuals but a mixture of the most selfish and the most public-spirited ones. We explore how two policy instruments -- the governor's compensation and anti-corruption enforcement -- affect the expected quality of governance through candidate self-selection. We also examine the effects of incumbency and term limits on self-selection in a dynamic version of the model.

Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper94.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper94.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper94.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ias.edu/sss/files/papers/econpaper94.pdf)

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:ads:wpaper:0094

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nancy Cotterman ().