How can we motivate good politicians those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens' preferences to … enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. We find …

cooperates, the alternative becomes depopulated. We analyze the success of this "voting with feet" mechanism and find that …

-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 …

We provide evidence about voters' response to crime control policies. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the … findings indicate that voters keep incumbent politicians accountable by conditioning their vote on the observed effects of …

results suggest that over-reliance on elections to discipline politicians is misplaced …