reducing bureaucratic corruption interdisciplinary perspectives on what works abstract this article offers the first comprehensive review of the interdisciplinary state of knowledge regarding anti corruption policies with a particular focus on reducing corruption among civil servants drawing on the work of economists political scientists sociologists and anthropologists we examine seven policy categories 1 rewards and penalties 2 monitoring 3 restructuring bureaucracies 4 screening and recruiting 5 anti corruption agencies 6 educational campaigns and 7 international agreements notably rigorous empirical evaluation is lacking for the majority of commonly prescribed anti corruption policies nevertheless we find growing evidence of the effectiveness of policies based on monitoring including anti corruption audits and e governance in addition adequate civil service wages seem to be a necessary but insufficient condition for control of corruption an emerging skepticism regarding the effectiveness of anti corruption agencies also is apparent in the literature we conclude with broader lessons drawn from our review such as the recognition that when corruption is a systemic problem it cannot be treated in the long term with individual level solutions

why do corrupt governments maintain public support this article addresses an issue often neglected by the current literature on political corruption why do citizens support corrupt governments the authors argue that people in countries where gove

legislative organization and pollution taxation the role of political institutions in shaping public policy has been analyzed in isolation from corruption and legislative organization specifically bicameralism has received minimal attention we analyze pollution taxation when decisions are influenced by several veto players such as legislative chambers our theory predicts that an increase in the number of veto players e g moving from uni to bi cameralism pushes the pollution tax towards the social optimum with the effect being conditional on corruption as such dispersion around the optimal tax is lower under bicameralism empirical tests using data from 86 countries support the theory

effectiveness of electoral systems for reducing government corruption a game theoretic analysis abstract a theoretical model is developed for predicting the relative effectiveness of different electoral systems for reducing government corruption we consider voting games in which parties with known corruption levels and known positions on a major policy question compete for legislative seats we find that approval voting and proportional representation are fully effective in the sense that all equilibria exclude corrupt parties from legislative seats plurality voting is partly effective in the sense that there always exist some equilibria that exclude corrupt parties borda voting is ineffective because for some political situations no equilibria can guarantee the exclusion of corrupt parties journal of economic literature classification number d72

institutions and economic performance endogeneity and parameter heterogeneity the hallmark of the recent development and growth literature is a quest to identify institutions that explain a significant portion of the observed differences in living standards across countries empirical work in the area focuses almost exclusively on either the global sample or on developing nations certainly it is important to know which institutions are lacking in these developing countries but the analysis provides little evidence for us to know to what extend a common set of institutions actually matters in advanced and developing countries in this paper we examine parameter heterogeneity in prominent approaches to institutions and economic performance we find that a new set of instruments is necessary to control for endogeneity but that a common set of economically important institutions does indeed exist among advanced and developing nations the impact of these institutions does vary substantially across samples it is about three times as high in developing countries as compared to oecd countries

the causes of legal rents extraction evidence from spanish municipalities this paper analyzes the causes of legal political rent extraction by using a direct measure of it namely local top politicians wages in particular we investigate whether local politicians incentives to extract rents by setting their own wages are influenced by the degree of political competition and voter information we use a sample of the largest spanish municipalities over the years 2008 2010 the results indicate that weaker political competition and lesser voter information are related to more rent extraction in an additional analysis we show that higher wages do not ensure better financial management these findings confirm that when politicians can set their own salaries higher wages do not mean better management but they are just political rents

electoral rules and environmental policy abstract this paper investigates the effect of electoral rules on environmental policymaking using several estimators from the program evaluation literature we find that governments set stricter environmental policies under proportional as opposed to majoritarian systems

explicating political hazards and safeguards a transaction cost politics approach we apply the logical of comparative institutional analysis to the question of the governance of the relationship between private investors and the government we consider two strategies that investors may follow lobbying for the creation of a specialized political governance structure or the reliance on more general political mechanisms to influence policy in that sector on an ongoing basis we identify political hazards as crucial determinant of the choice of political governance and the transactional attributes that give rise to such hazards finally we highlight shift parameters in a nation s institutional environment that influence the choice between specialized and generalized political governance mechanisms

a model of a team contest with an application to incentives under list proportional representation abstract we develop a model of a team contest for multiple indivisible prizes team members exert costly effort to improve their team s success we analyze two intrateam allocation rules under a list rule prizes are allocated according to a predetermined list under an egalitarian rule prizes are allocated according to a fair lottery we show that which allocation rule maximizes team success depends on the degree of complementarity between members efforts and the convexity of the individual cost of effort function we then apply the model to the context of elections under proportional representation with both open and closed lists we derive conditions under which closed lists generate stronger incentives than open lists our results offer a rationale for the lack of evidence on the negative incentive effects of closed lists

managerial incentive problems a dynamic perspective the paper studies how a person s concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job in the model the person s productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance there are no explicit output contingent contracts but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability an implicit contract links today s performance to future wages an incentive problem arises from the person s ability and desire to influence the learning process and therefore the wage process by taking unobserved actions that affect today s performance the fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual s concern for human capital returns and the firm s concern for financial returns the two need be only weakly related it is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned it is well understood by now that informational externalities may place special demands on the organization of economic exchange simple price mediated markets will frequently fail in the presence of asymmetric information in that case more elaborate contractual arrangements have to be used as substitutes for the price system lately considerable effort has been devoted to the analysis of contracting under incomplete information with the objective to understand the range of economic institutions that emerge in response to the failure of the price system the analysis of moral hazard has played a prominent role in this development moral hazard problems arise when for some reason or another transacting parties cannot contract contingent on the delivery of the good for instance in buying labour services it may be that the amount of labour supplied is not directly observable precluding a simple exchange of wage for labour as a partial remedy to this problem an imperfect mutually observed signal about the supply of labour can be used as a proxy in the contract frequently output is taken as such a proxy the drawback is that output is often influenced by other factors than labour input which induce undesirable risk into the contract one is therefore faced with a tradeoff between allocating risk associated with incomplete observability and providing incentives for a proper supply of labour gaining insight into this tradeoff is important not only for understanding contracting in the small e g managerial incentive schemes but also because it is closely related to the fundamental tension between equity and efficiency in the society as a whole while our understanding of moral hazard has advanced a lot in past years it is clear that much work remains an important question that has received little attention until

socio economic inequality in ill health amongst the elderly should one use current or permanent income in belgium income related inequality in ill health among the 65 is present but reduces significantly as soon as one restricts the analysis to the 65 the main goal of this paper is to check whether these findings based on current income are robust to the income concept used the analysis is repeated using estimates of permanent income measured inequality among the 65 remains very limited suggesting that the observed findings are not heavily dependent upon the income concept finally i suggest an explanation for the observed difference in inequality between the 65 and the 65 i argue that this difference is likely to be correlated with differences across income groups of 1 sample attrition and 2 mortality

the size and scope of government comparative politics with rational politicians we try to demonstrate how economists may engage in research on comparative politics relating the size and composition of government spending to the political system a downsian model of electoral competition and forward looking voting indicates that majoritarian as opposed to proportional elections increase competition between parties by focusing it into some key marginal districts this leads to less public goods less rents for politicians more redistribution and larger government a model of legislative bargaining and backward looking voting indicates that presidential as opposed to parliamentary regimes increase competition between both politicians and voters this leads to less public goods less rents for politicians less redistribution and smaller government we confront these predictions with cross country data from around 1990 controlling for economic and social determinants of government spending we nd strong and robust support for the prediction that the size of government is smaller under presidential regimes and weaker support for the prediction that majoritarian elections are associated with less public goods

constitutions and economic policy at the rare moments in history when a nation debates constitutional reform the key issues often concern how the reforms might affect economic policy and economic performance for example italy abandoned a system of pure proportional representation where legislators were elected according to the proportions of the popular national vote received by their parties and moved toward including ingredients of plurality rule where legislators are elected in each district according to who receives the highest number of votes key italian political leaders are now considering proposals to introduce elements of presidentialism where the head of government is elected by direct popular vote rather than the current parliamentary regime a common argument in italy was that the electoral reform would help stifle political corruption and reduce the propensity of italian governments to run budget deficits in the 1990s constitutional reforms have been debated and implemented in a number of other countries too for instance new zealand moved away from a pure system of plurality rule in single member districts to a system mixing elements of proportional representation japan also renounced its special form of plurality rule the so called single nontransferable vote in favor of a system that mixes elements of proportional and plurality representation similar proposals have been debated in the united kingdom in latin america questions have been raised as to whether the poor and volatile economic performance of many countries can be traced to their presidential form of government

empirical determinants of corruption a sensitivity analysis many variables have been proposed by past studies as significant determinants of corruption this paper asks if their estimated impact on corruption is robust to alteration of the information set a global sensitivity analysis based on the leamer s extreme bounds analysis gives a clear answer five variables are robustly related to corruption corruption is lower in richer countries where democratic institutions have been preserved for a long continuous period and the population is mainly protestant corruption is instead higher where political instability is a major problem finally a country s colonial heritage appears to be a significant determinant of present corruption

why do parties use primaries political selection versus candidate incentives this paper contrasts empirically two possible explanations for the party decision to use primaries desire to improve political selection selection effect or desire to increase political competition and incentives among candidates incentive effect using a simple model of endogenous primaries i show that each explanation implies a different relation between primary adoption and the strength of partisan support i estimate this relation using the case of latin american presidential primaries and find robust evidence that the incentive effect dominates the selection effect

the persistent effect of colonialism on corruption this paper argues that corruption in developing countries has deep historical roots that go all the way back to their colonial experience we substantiate our thesis with empirical evidence where the degree of european settlement during colonial times is a powerful explanatory factor of present day corruption interestingly our mechanism is different from the prevailing view in the literature on institutions and growth where european settlement has only positive effects we argue that european settlement leads to higher levels of corruption for all countries where europeans remained a minority in the population i e for all developing countries

aid effectiveness and the politics of personalism this article examines how political institutions that provide an incentive to cultivate a personal vote condition the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth in developing country democracies politicians in aid recipient countries with high levels of personalism are more likely to pursue corruption and target government spending to narrow constituencies because personalism affects these outcomes it provides incentives to use foreign aid for politically motivated spending at the expense of investing foreign aid in growth promoting public goods using panel data from 61 aid recipient democracies from 1961 to 2001 the author finds that aid increases growth in democracies with less personalist institutions but decreases growth in countries with high personalism the author also shows that personalism conditions the relationship between aid and the composition of government spending aid increases spending on public goods relative to narrow particularistic goods in countries with low person

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

does the internet reduce corruption evidence from u s states and across countries the authors test the hypothesis that the internet is a useful technology for controlling corruption in order to do so the authors develop a novel identification strategy for internet diffusion power disruptions damage digital equipment which increases the user cost of information technology it capital and thus lowers the speed of internet diffusion a natural phenomenon causing power disruptions is lightning activity which makes lightning a viable instrument for internet diffusion using ground based lightning detection censors as well as global satellite data the authors construct lightning density data for the contiguous united states u s states and a large cross section of countries empirically lightning density is a strong instrument for internet diffusion and the authors fourth estimates suggest that the emergence of the internet has served to reduce the extent of corruption across u s states and across the world

electoral rules and corruption is corruption systematically related to electoral rules recent theoretical work suggests a positive answer but little is known about the data we try to address this lacuna by relating corruption to different features of the electoral system in a sample of about eighty democracies in the 1990s we exploit the cross country variation in the data as well as the time variation arising from recent episodes of electoral reform the evidence is consistent with the theoretical priors larger voting districts and thus lower barriers to entry are associated with less corruption whereas larger shares of candidates elected from party lists and thus less individual accountability are associated with more corruption individual accountability appears to be most strongly tied to personal ballots in plurality rule elections even though open party lists also seem to have some effect because different aspects roughly offset each other a switch from strictly proportional to strictly majoritarian elections only has a small negative effect on corruption jel e62 h3

comparative politics and public finance we propose a model with micropolitical foundations to contrast different political regimes compared to a parliamentary regime the institutions of a presidential congressional regime produce fewer incentives for legislative cohesion but more separation of powers these differences are reflected in the size and composition of government spending a parliamentary regime has redistribution toward a majority less underprovision of public goods and more rents to politicians a presidential congressional regime has redistribution toward powerful minorities more underprovision of public goods but less rents to politicians the size of government is smaller under a presidential regime this last prediction is consistent with cross country data

the importance of the electoral rule evidence from italy abstract we test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in italy from 1993 to 2001 that moved the system for electing the parliament from purely proportional to a plurality rule for 75 of the seats we do not find any effect on either the number of parties or the stability of governments the two main objectives of the reform that remained unchanged at their pre reform level

electoral rules strategic entry and polarization abstract how does electoral rule disproportionality affect the structure of the party system i e the number and the policy platforms of the competing parties by studying a model where both party entry and platform choice are endogenous we are able to provide a unified theory an increasing electoral rule disproportionality exhibits a a first order negative effect on platform polarization b a second order negative effect on the number of parties as polarization decreases centrist parties are squeezed between other contenders and prefer not to enter and c an additional third order negative effect on polarization via the reduction of the number of parties we then conduct a laboratory experiment and strongly confirm the theoretical predictions of the model

comparative politics and environmental taxation abstract in this paper we take a step towards understanding the role of democratic institutions on the level of pollution taxation persson et al j polit economy 108 2000 1121 argue that presidential congressional regimes set lower taxes than parliamentary regimes this conclusion results from the checks and balances built into the former and the higher degree of legislative cohesion in the latter we test this prediction on gasoline and diesel prices using the method of propensity score matching along with data from 86 democratic countries the empirical evidence is consonant with the theory we find that ceteris paribus the average price of super gasoline is 0 14 0 20 less per liter in presidential congressional systems the average price of diesel gasoline is 0 11 0 14 less per liter

construction corrupts empirical evidence from a panel of 42 countries the construction sector whether privately or publicly financed is characterized by potentially large rents and government intervention making it vulnerable to corruption consistent with this both case study and survey evidence has been provided highlighting the problem of malfeasance in this sector in this article we test the proposition that a bigger construction sector is likely to be inimical to clean government based on a panel of 42 countries over the period 1995 2011 we control for a range of potentially confounding variables and the expectation that corrupt public officials may favor the development of this sector because it increases the volume of rents available to them our empirical evidence shows that a larger construction sector will tend to increase perceptions of the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain

decentralization and corruption evidence across countries the relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties is an important element in the recent debate on institutional design the theoretical literature makes ambiguous predictions about this relationship and it has remained virtually unexamined by empiricists the authors make a first attempt at examining the issue empirically by looking at the cross country relationship between fiscal decentralization and corruption as measured by a number of different indices their estimates suggest that fiscal decentralization in government spending is significantly associated with lower corruption moreover they find that the origin of a country s legal system for example civil versus common legal code performs extremely well as an instrument for decentralization the estimated relationship between decentralization when so instrumented and corruption is even stronger the evidence suggests a number of interesting areas for future work including investigating whether there are specific services for which decentralized provision has a particularly strong impact on political rent extraction and understanding the channels through which decentralization succeeds in keeping corruption in check

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

bipolar multicandidate elections with corruption the goals of democratic competition are not only to implement a majority s preference on policy questions but also to provide a deterrent against corrupt abuse of power by political leaders we consider a simple model of multicandidate elections in which different electoral systems can be compared according to these two criteria among a wide class of single winner scoring rules only approval voting is found to satisfy both effectiveness against corruption and majoritarianism for this model

political selection under alternative electoral rules we study the patterns of political selection in majoritarian versus proportional systems political parties face a trade off in choosing the mix of high and low quality candidates high quality candidates are valuable to voters and thus help to win elections but they crowd out loyal candidates who are most preferred by the parties under proportional representation politicians selection depends on the share of swing voters in the entire electorate in majoritarian elections it depends also on the distribution of competitive versus safe single member districts we show that a majoritarian system with only a few competitive districts is less capable of selecting good politicians than a proportional system as the share of competitive districts increases the majoritarian system becomes more efficient than the proportional system however for a large enough share of competitive districts a non monotonic relation arises the marginal positive effect of adding high quality politicians on the probability of winning the election is reduced and highly competitive majoritarian systems become less efficient than proportional ones in selecting good politicians

hold your nose and vote corruption and public decisions in a representative democracy this paper analyzes how corruption alters policy decisions in democracy and examines whether this distortion can result in a long term persistence of corruption even when the voters are well informed and rational by applying a citizen candidate model of representative democracy the paper analyzes how corruption distorts the allocation of resources between public and private consumption altering the policy preferences of elected and nonelected citizens in opposite directions the outcome is a reduction in real public expenditure and if the median voter s demand for public goods is sufficiently elastic a reduction in taxes in this case some citizens benefit indirectly from corruption the paper also presents some empirical evidence that in democratic countries corruption results in lower tax revenue and proceeds to show that when this occurs citizens anticipating a shift in preferences in favor of public expenditure may support institutions that favor corruption this result complements the findings of other studies that have attributed the persistence of corruption in democracy to some failure on the part of the voters or the electoral system it also bears implications for developing effective anticorruption strategies and for redefining the role that can be played by the international community

elites and corruption a theory of endogenous reform and a test using british data eighteenth century britain displayed patterns of corruption similar to those of developing countries today reforms enacted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eliminated many of these patterns this article develops a theoretical argument that seeks to explain why the british elite enacted anticorruption reforms and provides evidence using a new data set of members of the house of commons the author argues that the shock that pushed the british elite from preferring the old corrupt regime to preferring the reformed one was an increase in government spending and a corresponding increase in the costs of tolerating corruption features unique to britain allowed the reformist outcome to emerge and illuminate why such an outcome is difficult to achieve in general

corruption governance investment and growth in emerging markets the article investigates the potential impact of corruption on economic growth by examining the effect that corruption may have on several significant determinants of economic growth namely investment in human private and public capital and on governance our theoretical approach allows for corruption to influence economic growth directly and indirectly through different investment and governance channels all previous empirical work on this issue has been based on national income and product accounts nipa data which do not normally break down gross domestic investment into its private and public sector and if they do they misclassify investment by public enterprises as private investment potentially biasing empirical findings in this article we use a data set from the international finance corporation that bypasses these problems we find that the impact of corruption on the level of public investment appears to be more ambiguous than it has been found in the previous literature we however

consequences of constitutions the paper presents empirical findings regarding the economic policy consequences of constitutional arrangements in three different dimensions first the data are consistent with several theoretical predictions about the consequences of electoral rules and forms of government for fiscal policy and rent extraction even when non random constitution selection is taken into account second empirical tests of the predictions from a new comprehensive model of parliamentary democracy show that proportional elections raise government spending through their indirect consequences for party structures and types of government rather than through their direct effects on policymaking incentives third new empirical results suggest that constitutional arrangements may have important consequences for structural policies that promote long run economic performance hinting at a missing link in the causal chain from history to current economic performance all these empirical findings appear statistically robust and the estimated effects are large enough to be of genuine economic interest jel d72 e60 h00 o11

using micro surveys to measure and explain corruption summary this paper discusses survey techniques aimed at a better measurement of corruption at the micro level and argues that with appropriate survey methods and interview techniques it is possible to collect quantitative micro level data on corruption public expenditure tracking surveys service provider surveys and enterprise surveys are highlighted with several applications these surveys permit measurement of corruption at the level of individual agents such as schools health clinics or firms they also permit the study of mechanisms responsible for corruption including capture of public funds and bribery 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

electoral accountability and corruption evidence from the audits of local governments we show that political institutions affect corruption levels we use audit reports in brazil to construct new measures of political cor ruption in local governments and test whether electoral account ability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians we find significantly less corruption in municipalities where mayors can get reelected mayors with reelection incentives misappropriate 27 percent fewer resources than mayors without reelection incentives these effects are more pronounced among municipalities with less access to information and where the likelihood of judicial punish ment is lower overall our findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician s corrupt behavior jel d72 k42 017

do institutions affect citizens selection into politics traditional political economy has paid primary attention to the structuring of the principal agent relationship between citizens and politicians and the role of competition and institutions in disciplining political agents however as the electoral control of politicians and the credibility of policy commitments are limited this perspective needs to be complemented with an economics of political selection that takes into account the quality of those elected to political office we review the emerging literature which investigates institutional conditions that impact the selection of politicians we discuss pay in politics electoral rules institutions enhancing transparency in politics and institutions which govern dual office holding in different branches of government we argue that further comparative analyses are essential in order to gain an improved understanding of the impact that institutions have on political outcomes not only via the channel of accountability but also via the channel of selection

do bilateral investment treaties attract foreign direct investment the role of international dispute settlement provisions this paper studies the effects of the strength of bilateral investment treaties bits on foreign direct investment fdi activity we develop an index for the strength of international dispute settlement provisions included in bits in order to examine the role the content of bits plays in attracting fdi to this end we make use of data from unctad s international investment agreement mapping project and measure the provision strength of 2 571 bits using panel data of bilateral and total fdi inflows and inward fdi stocks we study the effect of bits on fdi our main finding indicates that stronger international dispute settlement provisions in bits are indeed associated with positive effects on fdi activity

single party rule public spending and political rents evidence from finnish municipalities in this paper i investigate the differences in public spending and extraction of political rents between single party and coalition governments common pool theories predict that coalitions tend t

selection vs accountability an experimental investigation of campaign promises in a moral hazard environment abstract we examine retrospective and prospective voting considerations in an experiment implementing a simple voting model in each period the official chooses how much rent to appropriate from a social endowment announcement of this choice is followed by an election between the official and a randomly selected challenger with the winner becoming the official in the next period we vary two features of the setting a the discount factor and b whether candidates can make costless non binding campaign promises about their behaviour if elected consistent with the model s predictions both raising the discount factor and introducing campaign promises lead to lower rent appropriation by officials and worse electoral outcomes other things equal for incumbents campaign promises despite being cheap talk have real effects promising less appropriation is rewarded by voters but breaking such promises is punished finally we find a weak positive association between campaign promises and officials subsequent behaviour

more politicians more corruption evidence from swedish municipalities in the literature on political economy and public choice it is typically assumed that government size correlates positively with public corruption the empirical literature however is inconclusive owing to both measurement problems and endogeneity this paper creates a corruption index based on original data from a survey covering top politicians and civil servants in all swedish municipalities the effect of more politicians on corruption problems is analyzed using discontinuities in the required minimum size of local councils despite the fact that sweden consistently has been ranked among the least corrupt countries in the world the survey suggest that non trivial corruption problems are present in sweden municipalities with more local council seats have more reported corruption problems and the regression discontinuity design suggests that the effect is causal

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

political competition and mirrleesian income taxation a first pass we study downsian competition in a mirrleesian model of income taxation the competing politicians may dier in competence if politicians engage in vote share maximization the less competent politician s policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents whereas those of the competent politician are attractive to the majority of poor agents the less competent politician wins with positive probability which gives rise to a political failure in the sense of besley and coate 1998 political failures are avoided if politicians maximize winning probabilities nevertheless the two equilibria cannot be pareto ranked the minority may be better o under vote share maximization

electoral rules and political selection theory and evidence from a field experiment in afghanistan voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own this article explores how electoral rules such as district magnitude mediate this trade off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes we show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple single member districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent candidates results from a unique field experiment in afghanistan are consistent with these predictions specifically representatives selected by elections with a single multi member district are better educated and exhibit less extreme policy preferences