The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness

Abstract

We survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians. We define stationary electoral equilibrium, which encompasses notions used by Barro (1973), Ferejohn (1986), Banks and Sundaram (1998), and others. We show that repeated elections mitigate the commitment problems of politicians and voters, and that a responsive democracy result holds under general conditions. Term limits, however, attenuate the responsiveness finding. We also touch on related applied work, and we point to areas for fruitful future research, including the connection between dynamic models of politics and economics. ( JEL D72, D82, D83)

Monitoring Corruptible Politicians

“…Accordingly, a growing body of research finds that voters' access to evaluations of politician performance enhances government responsiveness, reduces corruption and rent-seeking behaviors, and promotes electoral accountability in the short run. 1 However, it is not well understood whether monitoring and information dissemination policies can generate a sustained reduction in rent-seeking. Whether this is the case depends on the dynamic selection and incentive effects of this information.…”

“…We can isolate the impacts of timely audits due to incentive effects (among those incumbents in office) if we assume that the potential sorting of politicians based on their type can be captured by an incumbent fixed effect in a model analogous to equation (1). The estimate from this specification implies that there are 0.42 fewer findings of corruption per report in the short run ( Table 7, column 1).…”

Electoral Accountability and Responsive Democracy

“…Austen-Smith and Banks (1989) investigate the voter's ability to discipline politicians when all politicians have the same preferences, so that the model is one of pure moral hazard. In a two-period model of pure adverse selection, where politicians' policy choices are directly observed by voters, Duggan and Martinelli (2015) show that responsive democracy can arise due to the incentive of all politician types to "imitate" the median type. Theorem 6.1 in the current paper establishes that a form of this incentive holds for all above average types, delivering the responsiveness result even when policy choices are observed by voters with noise.…”

Salience and Accountability: School Infrastructure and Last-Minute Electoral Punishment

“…Finally, this paper relates to the literature on political agency (Ferejohn (1986), Besley (2007, Barro (1973), Duggan and Martinelli (2017)) and electoral accountability (Ashworth (2012), Banerjee et al (2011), Pande (2011), Nannicini et al (2013, Drago et al (2014), Casas et al (2017)). The hypothesis of retrospective voting has been tested in the context of variations in specific public policies (Casaburi and Troiano (2015), Drago et al (2017), Brender (2003, Brender and Drazen (2008), Alesina et al (2012)) and in the context of variation in voters' access to new information (Dias and Ferraz (2017), Ferraz and Finan (2008), Ferraz and Finan (2008), Chong et al (2014), Larreguy et al (2015).…”