Looking after Number One? Politicians' Rewards and the Economics of Politics
- 24 June 1992
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Political Studies
- Vol. 40 (2) , 207-226
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1992.tb01380.x
Abstract
The nature and level of rewards to politicians is an important issue in public management. It receives little theoretical attention in academic political science today, although it offers the basis of a Popperian ‘crucial experiment’ for testing the explanatory claims of the rent-seeking rational choice model of politics. This paper discusses the extent to which the core rent-seeking model can explain observed patterns of political rewards. It considers the core model against two modified models (each with two variants), using data from Australia and the UK and a limited number of observations drawn from other countries. The core-rent-seeking rational choice model appears to have poor explanatory power. A familiar overdetermination problem arises in testing the explanatory claims of modified models. Some disaggregation may be needed to refine the approach.Keywords
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