This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower competent politicians. In our model, candidates are privately informed about their abilities and are driven by office rents as well as...

This paper studies how policy choice and political selection are affected by the concentration of political power -- a central aspect of political institutions. We consider a setting with inefficient policy gambles: In equilibrium, politicians choose overly risky policies in order to appear...