Punching above One's Weight: The Case against Election Campaigns

Marco Haan, Bart Los, Sander Onderstal and Yohanes Riyanto ()

No 10-056/1, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Politicians differ in their ability to implement some policy. In an election, candidates make commitments regarding the plans they will try to implement if elected. These serve as a signal of true ability. In equilibrium, candidates make overambitious promises. The candidate with the highest ability wins. Yet, the electorate may be better off having a random candidate implement her best plan, rather than seeing the winner implementing an overambitious plan. This is more likely if the ability distribution is skewed toward high values, the number of candidates is high, with private benefits from being elected, or if parties select candidates.

Keywords: election promises; signalling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-06-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/10056.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:tin:wpaper:20100056

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 ().