We present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theory offers four main insights. Low-quality citizens have a "comparative advantage" in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). Hence, voters may find themselves supply constrained of high-quality candidates. Second, bad politicians generate negative externalities for good ones, making their rewards from office increasing in the average quality of office holders. This leads to multiple equilibria in quality. Third, incumbent policymakers can influence the rewards of future policymakers, leading to path dependence in quality: bad governments saw the seeds for more bad governments. Fourth, quality-constrained voters look for the optimal mix of honesty and ability, and this may lead to a negative correlation between these two qualities across political entities.The truth is that the city where those who rule are least eager to do so will be the best governed. Plato.have more to lose from giving up private life and/or less to gain from holding office. This comparative advantage tends to lower the quality of the pool of candidates from which voters can choose.Low-quality citizens' comparative advantage for politics is partially counter-balanced, however, by the fact that voters prefer good and clean policies, so candidates of higher quality have higher chances of election than candidates of lower quality. The degree of goodness or badness of politicians will then depend on the relative strength of these two effects. In particular, when the (legitimate) returns from holding office are sufficiently large, the comparative-advantage effect is weak, and high-quality citizens run for, and tend to win, office. However, when these returns are low, high-quality citizens choose to lead private lives, and voters are forced to make do with low-quality candidates. In other words, bad politicians win because rewards from office are too low to induce potentially good politicians to run.As we detail below, the rewards from elective office are a composite package of financial and psychological rewards (ego rents). Both these components are in part endogenous to the political process itself, so it would be unsatisfactory to leave things at that. This observation leads us to advance our second idea: there can be multiple equilibria in the quality of the governing class. This is because low-quality office holders generate a negative externality for high-quality ones. For example, the social status enjoyed by politicians is influenced by the perceived quality of the political class as a whole, so individual ego rents are negatively affected by a preponderance of low-quality office holders. Because of this externality there can be "good" equilibria in which -many office holders being of high quality -it pays for high-quality citizens to stand for election; and "bad" equilibria in which -many office holders...

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The KH module is a sequence motif found in a number of proteins that are known to be in close association with RNA. Experimental evidence suggests a direct involvement of KH in RNA binding. The human FMR1 protein, which has two KH domains, is associated with fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of mental retardation. Here we present the three-dimensional solution structure of the KH module. The domain consists of a stable beta alpha alpha beta beta alpha fold. On the basis of our results, we suggest a potential surface for RNA binding centered on the loop between the first two helices. Substitution of a well-conserved hydrophobic residue located on the second helix destroys the KH fold; a mutation of this position in FMR1 leads to an aggravated fragile X phenotype.

We define as populist a party that champions short-term protection policies without regard for their long-term costs. First, we study the demand for populism: we analyze the drivers of the populist vote using individual level data from multiple waves of surveys in Europe. Individual voting preferences are influenced directly by different measures of economic insecurity and by the decline in trust in traditional parties.However, economic shocks that undermine voters' security and trust in parties also discourage voter turnout, thus mitigating the estimated demand of populism when ignoring this turnout selection. Economic insecurity affects intentions to vote for populist parties and turnout incentives also indirectly because it causes trust in parties to fall. Second, we study the supply side: we find that populist parties are more likely to appear when the drivers of demand for populism accumulate, and more so in countries with weak checks and balances and with higher political fragmentation.The non-populist parties' policy response is to reduce the distance of their platform from that of new populist entrants, thereby magnifying the aggregate supply of populist policies.

We examine how countries' incentives to go to war depend on the "political bias" of their pivotal decision makers. This bias is measured by a decision maker’s risk/ reward ratio from a war compared to that of the country at large. If there is no political bias, then there are mutually acceptable transfers from one country to the other that will avoid a war in the presence of commitment or enforceability of peace treaties. There are cases with a strong enough bias on the part of one or both countries where war cannot be prevented by any transfer payments. Our results shed some new light on the uneven contender paradox and the interpretation of the "democratic peace." We examine countries' choices of the bias of their leaders and show that when transfers are possible, at least one country will choose a biased leader, as that leads to a strong bargaining position and extraction of transfers. (JEL D72, D74)