Do young politicians prioritize other types of municipal spending than old politicians? We study this question using …

-ideological voters, who care about national and local policies, strongly prefer experts. We show that parties compete on good politicians … prediction. We find that politicians with higher ex-ante quality - as measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and …, the characteristics of politicians belonging to opposite parties converge to high-quality levels in close races …

politicians' quality is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design relying on the fact … that in Italy the wage of the mayor increases non-monotonically at different thresholds. Results show that an exogenous …

geographical areas: incumbency increases turnout in the South of Italy, whereas we do not find any statistically significant effect … capital we speculate that this is the result of incumbent politicians using their resources to establish clienteles. …

findings indicate that voters keep incumbent politicians accountable by conditioning their vote on the observed effects of …