Politicians' Motivation, Political Culture, and Electoral Competition

Klaas J. Beniers () and Robert Dur
Additional contact information
Klaas J. Beniers: Faculty of Economics, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam

No 04-065/1, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave opportunistically if other politicians are more likely to behave opportunistically. A political culture may therefore be self-reinforcing and multiple equilibria may arise. We also show that politicians’ incentives to behave opportunistically increase with politicians’ pay and with polarization of policy preferences.

This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in International Tax and Public Finance .

Keywords: politicians' motivation; politicians' pay; political culture; electoral competition; coalition governments; reputation bashing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-06-09, Revised 2005-08-16
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/04065.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Politicians’ motivation, political culture, and electoral competition (2007)
Working Paper: Politicians’ Motivation, Political Culture, and Electoral Competition (2004)
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:tin:wpaper:20040065

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().