Businessman Candidates
43 Pages Posted: 7 Jan 2007
There are 2 versions of this paper
Businessman Candidates
Date Written: December 2006
Abstract
In immature democracies, businessmen run for public office to gain direct control over policy; in mature democracies they typically rely on other means of influence. We develop a simple model to show that businessmen run for office only when two conditions hold. First, as in many immature democracies, institutions that make reneging on campaign promises costly must be poorly developed. In such environments, office holders have monopoly power that can be used to extract rents, and businessmen run to capture those rents. Second, the returns to businessmen from policy influence must not be too large, as otherwise high rents from holding office draw professional politicians into the race, crowding out businessmen candidates. Analysis of data on Russian gubernatorial elections supports these predictions. Businessman candidates are less likely 1) in regions with high media freedom and government transparency, institutions that raise the cost of reneging on campaign promises, and 2) in regions where returns to policy influence (measured by regional resource abundance) are large, but only where media are unfree and government nontransparent.
Keywords: Political connections, businessman candidates, immature democracy, media freedom, government transparency, strength of political parties
JEL Classification: D72
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effects of Brazil's Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes
By Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan
-
Democratization, Decentralization and the Distribution of Local Public Goods in a Poor Rural Economy
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
The Impact of Political Leaders' Profession and Education on Reforms
By Axel Dreher, Michael J. Lamla, ...
-
Businessman Candidates: Special-Interest Politics in Weakly Institutionalized Environments
By Scott Gehlbach and Konstantin Sonin