04/30/18 Colloquium - Miriam Golden: “Reelection, Political Selection, and Development”

We assemble original data from 112 countries around the world on the reelection rates of national legislators in recent elections. The data show that incumbent reelection rates increase substantially with a country’s level of economic development. Using a political agency model with endogenous entry to interpret this pattern, we argue that as a country develops, the pool of politicians improves. We use empirical methods to explore mechanisms that could account for the pattern in political selection that we identify