Candidate Entry, Screening, and the Political Budget Cycle

Eric Le Borgne and Ben Lockwood

No 269353, Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics

Abstract: We investigate whether relevant private information about citizens’ competence in political office can be credibly revealed by their entry and campaign expenditure decisions, as opposed to choice of policy once in office. We find that this depends on whether voters and candidates have common or conflicting interests; only in the former case can entry be revealing in equilibrium. We apply these results to Rogoff’s (1990) model of the political budget cycle, allowing for candidate entry, as well as elections: as interests are common, low-ability candidates are screened out at the entry stage, and so there is no signaling via fiscal policy (i.e. no “political budget cycle”). In a variant of the Rogoff model where citizens differ in honesty, rather than ability, interests are conflicting, and so the political budget cycle can persist in equilibrium.

Keywords: Political Economy; Public Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2001-08-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/269353/files/twerp582.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/269353/files/twerp582.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Candidate Entry, Screening, and the Political Budget Cycle (2002)
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:ags:uwarer:269353

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.269353

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().