Political Agency and Public-Good Provision--论文代写范文精选

选举不是基于竞选承诺，但作为回顾性评价的记录。选民不直接观察能力和他的行动。他们的推理是基于一个不完美的公益信号。下面的paper代写范文进一步叙述。

Abstract 
In this section, we present the model of political agency that underpins our analysis of optimal political integration. Imperfectly informed voters face the problem of selecting and incentivizing self-interested rent-seeking politicians. We model electoral discipline in a framework of political career concerns (Alesina and Tabellini 2008). Voters try to retain competent politicians and dismiss incompetent ones. In solving this screening problem, they also create incentives for politicians to provide public goods. The incumbent moderates rent extraction because higher public-good provision raises votersí inference of his ability and thus his chances of re-election.

Elections and Information
The incumbent faces reelection at the end of each period. If ousted he will never return to power. Politicians cannot make policy commitments, so the election is not based on campaign promises but on retrospective evaluation of the incumbentís track record. Voters do not observe directly the incumbentís competence nor his actions. Their inference is based on an imperfect signal of public-good provision. The textbook model of career concerns assumes that voters observe policy outcomes with additive noise. We assume instead that voter information is binary. An informed voter observes perfectly the vector gt of realized public goods. An uninformed voter receives no informative signal of gt , or proves completely incapable of understanding information about gt . 4 The electorate consists of a continuum of atomistic voters, partitioned into J groups. Group j comprises a fraction  j of voters, whose preferences are described by the vector of their ideal shares. The share of group-j members who are informed about public-good provision is a random variable j t , independent and identically distributed over time. Our model is robust to an arbitrary correlation of information across voters.5

Political Career Concerns 
Voters rationally expect every politician to choose the stationary investment  x. The equilibrium allocation is time-invariant because the environment is stationary. It does not vary with the incumbentís observed skills "t1 because performance is separable in e§ort and ability. It cannot vary with the competence innovations "t because they are unknown to the politicians themselves when they make policy choices.7

The key result in Lemma 1 is that rent extraction is decreasing but convex in voter information (@ 2 =@ 2 j > 0).12 Decreasing returns to monitoring follow from the dynamic nature of the politiciansíproblem. The direct impact of voter information on rent extraction is linear (equation 10). For a given value of re-election R, more informed voters induce one-to-one more investment and lower political rents. A transitory one-period increase in voter information would have no other e§ect, but a permanent increase in voter information has an indirect e§ect too. Politicians understand expect tighter monitoring if they are reelected, so the expected future rents from holding o¢ ce decrease. Their decline reduces the incentives to refrain from extracting rents and mitigates the direct e§ect of improved monitoring. 

Current rent extraction is more sensitive to the expectation of future rents when votersíaverage information is higher. Thus, a marginal increase in votersíinformation causes a lower decline in rent extraction when the share of informed voters is higher to begin with.13 A large body of evidence conÖrms that the quality of government is higher if citizens are more educated and politicians are subject to greater media scrutiny (e.g., Glaeser et al. 2004; Svensson 2005; Glaeser and Saks 2006; Snyder and Strˆmberg 2010). While none of these studies have explored speciÖcally the concavity of this relationship, the data provide suggestive empirical support for our prediction. Svenssonís (2005) documents that low human capital is the best predictor of high corruption across countries. Consistent with Lemma 1, Figure 1 shows that corruption is not only a decreasing but also a convex function of the share of people with a tertiary education. A similar relationship emerges in Figure 2, where we proxy information with newspaper circulation instead. Both results are robust to controlling for income.14

Our Önding that government accountability is an increasing but concave function of voter information has a broader theoretical underpinning. The mechanism in Lemma 1 applies to any determinant of electoral discipline. Information, however, has an additional source of concavity: it can be shared by voters. The share j t of informed voters then results from a two-stage process (Ponzetto 2011; Ponzetto and Troiano 2014). First, it includes those who acquired information directly, for instance because they read newspapers or because their human capital enables them to assess politiciansíperformance accurately. Second, it includes those who did not acquire information directly but obtained it from an informed neighbor. Overall, the expected share of informed voters  j is an increasing and concave function of the probability that each voter acquires information directly, because one voterís knowledge has greater spillovers if his neighbors are less informed.15(paper代写)

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