Candidate quality

Poutvaara, Panu und Takalo, Tuomas (2007): Candidate quality. In: International Tax and Public Finance, Vol. 14, No. 1: pp. 7-27

Abstract

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Economics; Economics > Chairs > CESifo-Professorship for International Institutional Comparisons
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• Language: English