We study the recruitment of individuals in the political sector. We propose an equilibrium model of political recruitment by two political parties competing in an election. We show that political parties may deliberately choose to recruit only mediocre politicians, in spite of the fact that they...

This paper studies the nonparametric identification and estimation of voters' preferences when voters are ideological. We build on the methods introduced by Degan and Merlo (2009) representing elections as Voronoi tessellations of the ideological space. We exploit the properties of this...

We analyze the career profiles of Italian legislators in the post-war period. Using a unique, newly collected dataset that contains detailed information on all the politicians who have been elected to the Italian Parliament between 1948 and 2008, we address a number of important issues that...

We study the initial recruitment of individuals in the political sector. We propose an equilibrium model of political recruitment by two political parties competing in an election. We show that political parties may deliberately choose to recruit only mediocre politicians, in spite of the fact...