Collaborative Research: The Industrial Organization of the Political Sector: Politicians and Parties

提案编号：0617901机构：加州理工学院国家科学基金会计划：经济学首席研究员：马托齐，安德里亚标题：关于政治部门工业组织的合作研究：政客和政党摘要代议制民主的存在和运作，公民将决策委托给民选代表，取决于政治部门的存在，在政治部门中，选民、政党和政客代表市场部门中的消费者、公司和管理者。政治和市场技能的个人天赋相互关联的程度，或政治部门的经验在市场部门也很有价值，将这两个部门的劳动力市场联系在一起。这种联系影响着政治家的选择、他们的职业生涯以及政党和选民之间的关系。拟议的研究将集中在两个问题上，即在一个具有政治和市场部门的经济体中，政党、选民和政客之间的互动。第一个问题涉及公职候选人的选择、政治家的职业生涯和政党的内部组织。第二个问题与政党招募政客有关。研究将建立和解决信息不对称的动态均衡模型，其中个人的市场和政治能力是不同的，个人的技能天赋是正相关的，无限长寿的政党可以提名公职候选人，但必须得到选民的批准。该模型将根据政治部门个人的出入境以及他们在几个国家的政治生涯的微观数据进行估计，私人投资机构将收集这些数据。这项研究的理论基础源于政治经济学的创新微观经济学理论，该理论以一种一般均衡理论的方式将政治行为者和私人决策者整合在一起，其中政治制度和结果是内生的。这项研究对有关政治部门的产业组织及其与市场部门的互动的文献有重要贡献。通过开发和经验性地实施政党和政治家行为的新的动态模型，这项研究将使我们能够解释不同国家和时间的政治生涯类型和持续时间的系统性差异，估计不同政治制度下个人对政治经验的回报，并调查政治家的职业选择和政党的内部组织在多大程度上依赖于政治经济环境的制度特征。政治部门构成了经济的一大部分，政党和政客对经济的其余部分有很大的影响力。这项研究将有助于我们了解政治部门的内部组织，并将探讨更广泛的问题，例如：政党和选民在选择政治家方面的作用，货币奖励对政治家素质及其职业道路的影响，政治制度在成为政治家的奖励和个人从政治经验中回归方面是否有所不同，以及不同选举制度之间政治家的特征和职业道路是否有系统地不同。这些问题的答案对政治系统的有效组织具有影响。

Proposal No: 0617901 Institution: California Institute of TechnologyNSF Program: ECONOMICS Principal Investigator: Mattozzi, Andrea Title: Collaborative Research on The Industrial Organization of the Political Sector: Politicians and Parties ABSTRACTThe very existence and functioning of representative democracy, where citizens delegate policy-making to elected representatives, hinge on the presence of a political sector, in which voters, parties, and politicians represent the counterparts of consumers, firms and managers in the market sector. The extent to which individual endowments of politicaland market skills are correlated, or experience in the political sector is also valuable in the market sector, link the labor markets in the two sectors. This link affects the selection of politicians, their careers, and the relationship between parties and voters. The proposed research will focus on two issues regarding the interactions between parties, voters and politicians in an economy with a political and a market sector. The first issue pertains to the selection of candidates for public office, the careers of politicians, and the internal organization of parties. The second issue pertains to the recruitment of politicians by political parties. The research will develop and solve dynamic equilibrium models with asymmetric information, where individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their market and political abilities, individual skill-endowments positively correlated, and infinitely-lived parties may nominate candidates for public office subject to the voters approval. The model will be estimated with micro data on the entry and exit of individuals in the political sector as well as their political careers in several countries the PIs will collect. The intellectual basis of this research stem from the innovative microeconomic theory of political economy that integrate political actors with private decision-makers in a general equilibrium theory way, where political institutions and outcomes are endogenous. This research contributes significantly to the literature on the industrial organization of the political sector and its interactions with the market sector. By developing and empirically implementing new dynamic models of the behavior of parties and politicians, this research will allow us to explain systematic differences in the types and durations of political careers across countries and through time, to estimate the individual returns to political experience in different political systems, and to investigate the extent to which politicians career choices and the internal organization of parties depend on institutional features of the political-economic environment. The political sector constitutes a large part of the economy, and political parties and politicians have a big influence on the remaining part of the economy. This research will contribute to our understanding of the internal organization of the political sector and will address broader issues such as: the role parties and voters in the selection of politicians, the effects of monetary incentives on the quality of politicians and their career paths, whether political systems differ with respect to the incentives for becoming politicians and the return to an individual from political experience, and whether the characteristics of politicians and their career paths differ systematically across electoral systems. Answers to these issues have implications for the efficient organization of political systems.