Young Politicians: Different Politics?

The Transparency of Politics and the Quality of Politicians

Politics has always attracted the attention of the media, citizens organizations, and the general public. Recent years have also witnessed a global process of “spectacularization” of politics, which among other things has resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of information available about many facets of political life. Politicians, for example, are literally public figures, and much of...

The cognitive processing of politics and politicians: archival studies of conceptual and integrative complexity.

This article reviews over 30 years of research on the role of integrative complexity (IC) in politics. IC is a measure of the cognitive structure underlying information processing and decision making in a specific situation and time of interest to the researcher or policymaker. As such, it is a state counterpart of conceptual complexity, the trait (transsituationally and transtemporally stable)...

Overprotected Politicians

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost to his or her survival. The social cost of political assassination is much smaller as politicians are replaceable. Conversely, the private cost of the securit...

Bad Politicians

We present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theory offers three main insights. Low-quality citizens have a ‘comparative advantage’ in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). Hence, voters may find themsel...

When Topologists Are Politicians...