Private agenda and re-election incentives

Consider a politician who has to take two sequential decisions during his term in office. For each decision, the politician faces a trade-off between taking what he believes to be the decision that generates a public benefit, thus increasing his chances of re-election, and taking the decision that increases his private gain but is likely to decrease his chances of re-election. In our results we find that if the politician is a good enough decision maker and he desires to be re-elected enough, he takes the action that generates a public benefit regardless of his private interests. Moreover, we find that the behavior such that the politician delays taking the action that generates a public benefit to the last period of his term in office before he is up for re-election is optimal if and only if he has either very high or very low decision making skills. JEL Classification: D72, D81.