The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness

Abstract

We survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians. We define stationary electoral equilibrium, which encompasses notions used by Barro (1973), Ferejohn (1986), Banks and Sundaram (1998), and others. We show that repeated elections mitigate the commitment problems of politicians and voters, and that a responsive democracy result holds under general conditions. Term limits, however, attenuate the responsiveness finding. We also touch on related applied work, and we point to areas for fruitful future research, including the connection between dynamic models of politics and economics. ( JEL D72, D82, D83)