ABSTRACT
Citizen-candidate models – specifically Osborne and Slivinski (1996) ‘A model of political competition with citizen-candidates’ and Besley and Coate (1997) ‘An Economic Model of Representative Democracy’ – can be looked upon as part of a larger enterprise by economists to explain politics on the same principles that are employed to explain markets. For politics as for markets, we seek to explain aggregate outcomes as equilibria emerging from uncoordinated actions by rational, self-interested people, to determine when outcomes are, in some sense, in the public interest, to identify sources of inefficiency and to provide a platform for prediction and for reform. It is argued here that the outcome of this exercise in political model building is rendered interesting and informative by revealing the very opposite of what the authors sought to discover, an irreducible core where no equilibrium prevails and public choice can only emerge as a consequence of negotiation and bargaining.
