Journal of Economic Literature
ISSN 0022-0515 (Print) | ISSN 2328-8175 (Online)
The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness
Journal of Economic Literature
vol. 55,
no. 3, September 2017
(pp. 916–84)
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.Citation
Duggan, John, and César Martinelli. 2017. "The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness." Journal of Economic Literature, 55 (3): 916–84. DOI: 10.1257/jel.20150927Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness