Moonlighting Politicians: Motivation Matters!

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. In this paper we study optimal choices of self-selection into politics and commitment once in office on the part of citizens with heterogeneous abilities and heterogeneous motivations. Politicians can moonlight, i.e., they can work in the market sector while appointed in parliament. Our theoretical framework shows that high-ability citizens may enter politics. Yet while high-ability non-motivated (market-fit) politicians are likely to shirk, high-ability motivated (public-fit) ones are more committed to parliamentary activity. We test our predictions by using a unique database of Italian parliamentarians for the period 1996-2006. We find evidence of advantageous selection of the market-fit and the public-fit politicians in that they both display a pre-election income greater than that of the Italian population. We also show that the commitment of the market-fit parliamentarians in terms of voting attendance is negatively affected by income opportunities, whilst this is not the case for the public-fit ones.JEL Classification: P16, J45, J24, J32

Do Institutions Affect Citizens' Selection Into Politics?

“…Fedele and Naticchioni () extend the framework by Gagliarducci et al . () and introduce citizens who differ in ability and motivation.…”

Paying Politicians: Not Too Little, Not Too Much

“…Only a few political economy papers allow for two‐dimensional heterogeneity among agents. In Beniers and Dur (), politicians vary in competence and the extent to which they care about the public interest, while in Fedele and Naticchioni (), politicians have heterogeneous abilities and different fits with the working environment; both papers investigate the behaviour of politicians once in office but not the link between pay and selection. Caselli and Morelli () show that competent and honest individuals are attracted only when the pay is relatively high.…”

“…By contrast, Fedele (2018) argues that motivation of potential nurses is a state of autonomous extrinsic motivation, and identifies conditions under which high wages attract able and motivated individuals, thus maximizing the quality of care. Delfgaauw and Dur (2010) investigate self-selection into the public sector and show that if public sector remuneration is lower than that in the market sector, more able individuals choose the market sector, while more motivated individuals work in the public sector.…”

“…In Subsection C.1 of the Online Appendix, we show that the benchmark analysis results are not affected. As for the general analysis, the case where both PSM and skills are unobservable is analysed in Fedele and Giannoccolo (2013), where the inverted U-shaped relationship between equilibrium welfare and politician's pay is shown to hold true under some parametric restrictions. We stress that the full unobservability case is not our preferred specification because the election becomes completely random and its screening role is overlooked.…”

Conservative Politicians and Voting on Same-sex Marriage

“…Scholars examine how electoral competition influences politicians' activities in parliament and outside earnings (Becker et al, 2009;Bernecker, 2014;Gavoille and Verschelde, 2017). On politicians' activities and attendance in parliament, see Arnold et al (2014), Gehring et al (2015), Geys (2015), and Fedele and Naticchioni (2016). On how compensation influences the decision to run for office, see Poutvaara and Takalo (2007).…”