Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/20441 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 1195
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
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.
Subjects: 
politicians' competence
career concerns
campaigning costs
rewards for elected officials
citizen-candidate models
JEL: 
J4
D72
J24
D70
D79
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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