IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jeclit/v55y2017i3p916-84.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • John Duggan
  • César Martinelli

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.

Suggested Citation

  • John Duggan & César Martinelli, 2017. "The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 55(3), pages 916-984, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:aea:jeclit:v:55:y:2017:i:3:p:916-84
    Note: DOI: 10.1257/jel.20150927
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20150927
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=bXV56Kt54uW7uP8rxfaroMF2Zo7STu3W
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:jeclit:v:55:y:2017:i:3:p:916-84. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.