Mediocracy, Third Version

Andrea Mattozzi and Antonio Merlo

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: We study the recruitment of individuals in the political sector. We propose an equilibrium model of political recruitment by two political parties competing in an election. We show that political parties may deliberately choose to recruit only mediocre politicians, in spite of the fact that they could select better individuals. Furthermore, we show that this phenomenon is more likely to occur in proportional than in majoritarian electoral systems.

Keywords: Politicians; parties; political recruitment; electoral systems; all-pay auctions. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 D72 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2010-04-01, Revised 2011-01-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/file ... ng-papers/11-002.pdf (application/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:pen:papers:11-002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Administrator ().