Candidate Entry, Screening, and the Political Budget Cycle

Eric Le Borgne and Ben Lockwood

No 2002/048, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

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

Keywords: WP; mover accent; Asymmetric Information; Citizen-Candidate; Representative Democracy; Signaling Games; and Political Budget Cycles; office holder; candidate entry; entry stage; campaign expenditure decision; entry decision; Budget planning and preparation; Moral hazard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39
Date: 2002-03-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Candidate Entry, Screening, and the Political Budget Cycle (2001)
Working Paper: Candidate Entry, Screening, and the Political Budget Cycle (2000)
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