-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 …

migrant women: gender and migrant condition. Our findings suggest that migrant women do face this double disadvantage. In both …

, they will be more likely to run for election; for the same reason, they will also be more likely to shirk once elected … empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along with good but not fully committed politicians. There is … in fact a non-negligible fraction of citizens with remarkably high pre-election income who are appointed in parliament …

politicians' rents than proportional representation. We test these predictions using micro data for the mixed-member Italian House …

Koizumi but not for his principal policy and (2) a significant impact of TV is only observed among women. The habit of reading … candidate to win an election, even though his main agenda item (i.e., postal privatization) is strongly opposed by special …

We develop a simple two period model to study the importance of motivational differences among politicians in … describing the role of elections and explaining policy choices. In our model, politicians differ in their motives of running … public office. Good politicians care about policies while bad politicians care about rent extraction. Voters want to control …

As the performance of long-term projects is not observable in the short run politicians may pander to public opinion … to stand for reelection. Reelection thresholds are offered by politicians during campaigns. We show that, on balance, the …