Making Elections Work: Accountability with Selection and Control

We study the limits of dynamic electoral accountability when voters are uncertain about politicians’ characteristics (adverse selection) and their actions (moral hazard). Existing work argues that voters cannot achieve their first-best payoff. This is attributed to inherent deficiencies of the electoral contract, including voters’ inability to pre-commit, and the restriction to a binary retention-replacement decision. We provide conditions under which, despite these constraints, voters can obtain arbitrarily close to the first-best payoff in an equilibrium of the electoral interaction. Our paper resolves that there need not be a trade-off between selection and control.