Candidate Quality

35 Pages Posted: 28 Jan 2004

See all articles by Panu Poutvaara

Panu Poutvaara

University of Helsinki - Department of Economics; Helsinki Center of Economic Research (HECER); CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute); IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Tuomas Takalo

Bank of Finland

Date Written: June 2004

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.

JEL Classification: D70, D72, D79, J24, J4

Suggested Citation

Poutvaara, Panu and Takalo, Tuomas, Candidate Quality (June 2004). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=486063 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.486063

Panu Poutvaara (Contact Author)

University of Helsinki - Department of Economics ( email )

P.O. Box 54
FIN-00014 Helsinki
Finland

HOME PAGE: http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/blogs/poutvaar/

Helsinki Center of Economic Research (HECER) ( email )

FI-00014 Helsinki
Finland

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)

Poschinger Str. 5
Munich, DE-81679
Germany

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Tuomas Takalo

Bank of Finland ( email )

P.O. Box 160
Helsinki 00101
Finland

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