Reputation and Accountability in Repeated Elections
Year: 2010
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper studies a model of in…nitely repeated elections in which vot- ers attempt simultaneously to select competent politicians and to provide them with incentives to exert costly eort. Voters are unable to incentivize eort if they base their reelection decisions only on incumbent reputation. However, equilibria in which voters use reputation-dependent performance cutos (RDC) to make reelection decisions exist and support positive eort. In these equilibria, politicians'eort is decreasing in reputation, and ex- pected performance is decreasing in tenure. Like the equilibria in Ferejohn (1986), RDC equilibria rely on voters being indierent between reelecting incumbents and electing challengers. I show that this voter-indierence con- dition is closely related to weak renegotiation-proofness (Farrell and Maskin (1989)).
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Rainer Schwabe
Institution: Bank of Mexico
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2170273006