The Provision of Public Goods Under Alternative Electoral Incentives
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper shows that politicians may not offer to provide a socially desirable public good because the benefits of the public good cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending. We present a Downsian model where candidates care only about the spoils of office. We compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils of office are split among the two candidates proportionally to their share of the vote. We show that in a winner-take-all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable. We then show that the electoral college (the system used in U.S. presidential elections) is particularly subject to this inefficiency. Department of Economics, 001 Fisher Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1021 Home © 1999 Site Administrator Tel 609-258-4501 Fax 609-258-6419 Updated: 11-22-99 The Provision of Public Goods Under Alternative Electoral Incentives∗ Alessandro Lizzeri¶and Nicola Persico‖
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