Private Agenda and Re-Election Incentives

Consider a politician who has to take several decisions during his term in office. For each decision, the politician faces a trade-off between taking what he believes to be the right choice, 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. Within this setting, we consider how different factors affect the incentives of the politician to take the right choice. In our results we find, among others, that the behavior such that the politician follows his private interests in the first periods of his term in office and then tries to please the electorate when elections approach is optimal if and only if he has either very high or very low decision making skills. Furthermore, we find that it is not true that a more demanding electorate produces more socially motivated politicians.