 Bad Apples: Political Paralysis and the Quality of PoliticiansSTICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE Abstract: Why do elected officials often suffer from political paralysis and fail to implement thebest policies available? This paper considers a new yet intuitive explanation thatfocuses on the quality of the politicians competing to replace the incumbent. Thekey insight is that a 'good' incumbent with preferences identical to those of arepresentative voter will want to keep corrupt politicians out of office; she may do soby distorting her policy choices to signal her type and win re-election. The value ofsignalling and staying in office increases with the fraction of corrupt types in thepopulation of politicians. Electing good types may therefore not be enough to ensurethat the best policies are implemented, especially when corrupt politicians arecommon. This provides a new explanation for why political failure is particularlysevere in corrupt democracies. Keywords: political agency; corruption; elections; term limits; economic reform; politician quality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:stieop:013 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE |
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