The citizen-candidate approach, proposed to study the performance of representative democracies, builds on a multi-stage game where the same agents are asked whether or not to become a candidate and, successively, to vote. Consistently, the solution concept adopted in Besley and Coate (1997)...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the links between lack of trust in ruling politicians and the functioning of a representative democracy. Within a standard principal-agent model of democracy, we show how lack of trust by citizens as reflected by passive beliefs updating may lead to the...