Do Elections Always Motivate Incumbents? Learning vs. Re-Election Concerns

Borgne, Eric Le; Lockwood, Ben

doi:10.1007/s11127-006-0863-6

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Both the model itself and the signal jamming logic that it develops have been applied by economic theorists in a wide array of fields, including labor relationships and organizational economics (for a survey see Borland 1992), industrial organization (e.g., Tirole 1986, Samuelson et al 1994), financial economics (e.g., Stein 1989), and political economy (e.g., Lohmann 1998, 1999, LeBorgne and Lockwood 2006. However, the abundance of theoretical work has been met by relatively few empirical studies on the effectiveness of career concerns (Gibbons andMurphy 1992, Fee andHadlock 2003).…”

Section: A N U S C R I P T 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Career Concerns Incentives: An Experimental Test

2009

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Holmström's (1982/99) career concerns model has become a workhorse for analyzing agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way, which is difficult to directly test with field data: typically little is known about the information that individuals base their decisions on. Our laboratory experiment provides prima facie evidence: i) the signal jamming mechanism successfully creates incentives on the labor supply side; ii) decision errors take time to decrease; iii) while subjects' average beliefs are remarkably consistent with play, a mild winner's curse arises on the labor demand side.JEL-Classification: C91, D83, L14

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Section: A N U S C R I P T 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Career Concerns Incentives: An Experimental Test

2009

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“…3 3 While the literature on principal‐agent‐type models of politics is large and ever‐expanding, virtually all of this work studies nonpartisan settings. A sampling includes Barro (1973), Ferejohn (1986), Rogoff and Sibert (1988), Austen‐Smith and Banks (1989), Rogoff (1990), Banks and Sundaram (1993, 1998), Harrington (1993), Persson, Roland, and Tabellini (1997), Fearon (1999), Berganza (2000), Le Borgne and Lockwood (2001, 2006), Smart and Sturm (2003, 2007), Hindriks and Belleflamme (2005), Hatfield and Padró i Miquel (2006), Besley (2006), and Besley and Smart (2007). Exceptions are Bernhardt et al (2009), Campuzano (2005), and Meirowitz (2007). …”

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confidence: 99%

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

Snyder

Ting

2011

American J Political Sci

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We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party's candidate for a general election can be selected either by a "centralized" mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and both primary and general elections may reveal candidate valences. Our main theoretical result is that while primaries raise the expected quality of a party's candidates, they may hurt the ex ante preferred party in a competitive electorate by increasing the chances of revealing the opposing party's candidates as superior. Thus, primaries are adopted in relatively extreme districts where a clear favorite party exists. An empirical analysis of the adoption of direct primaries and the competitiveness of primary elections across U.S. states supports these predictions.

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“…Persson, Roland and Tabellini (1997) A similarity between their paper and ours is the emphasis on imperfect information about policy consequences on the part of voters. Le Borgne and Lockwood (2003) show that elections may discourage politician to act on voters' preferences. Following Rogo¤ (1990), they distinguish between less competent and more competent politicians.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do elections lead to informed public decisions?

Swank

Visser

2006

Public Choice

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Democracies delegate substantial decision power to politicians. Using a model in which an incumbent can design, examine and implement public policies, we show that examination takes place in spite of, rather than thanks to, elections. Elections are needed as a carrot and a stick to motivate politicians, yet politicians who are overly interested in re-election shy away from policy examination. Our analysis sheds light on the distance created in mature democracies between the political process and the production of policy relevant information; on the role played by probing into candidates' past; and on the possibility of crowding out desirable political behaviour by increasing the value of holding o¢ce.

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Do Elections Always Motivate Incumbents? Learning vs. Re-Election Concerns

Cited by 17 publications

References 16 publications

Career Concerns Incentives: An Experimental Test

Career Concerns Incentives: An Experimental Test

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

Do elections lead to informed public decisions?

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