Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently … politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central question. In this paper, we examine whether higher wages attract … better quality politicians and improve political performance using exogenous variation in the salaries of local legislators …

A key tenet of representative democracy is that politicians' discourse and policies should follow voters' preferences … opponent, as compared to the platform of the runner-up who did not qualify for the last round. We conclude that politicians …

political party may deliberately choose to recruit only mediocre politicians, in spite of the fact that it could afford to … recruit better individuals who would like to become politicians. We argue that this finding may contribute to explain the …

and politicians' personal connections made during the school years, we document a propensity of connected legislators to … vote together that depends on how salient the bill is to the politicians' legislative agenda. Although this activity does …

---voters are pessimistic about common-interest opportunities, politicians behave in a purely partisan manner that shuts down voter …, with politicians engaging in strategically polarized and polarizing behavior which leads to pessimistic beliefs among …