Bryan Caplan at EconLog has an answer to Brad DeLong's constant refrain "Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Fools?" (see for example here and here). It is that:
...democratic rule by fools is perfectly normal. Or to be more accurate, in a democracy our rulers are older versions of the popular kids from high school. The only difference is that politicians are champions in the Olympics of popularity contests. They are painfully weak on substance, but have an amazing ability to make people like them. And if they have to choose between being right and being popular, they don't think twice. They're Olympians; their overriding priority is winning.
In the end politicians who deliver the right policies, irrespective of whether they are popular, are likely to be less succesful than those who promise voters they will pursue popular policies (though the case of death penalties outside the US is an interesting counterfactual). Bryan concludes:
We're ruled by fools election after election because the majority habitually prefers affable fools to disagreeable pedants.
Maybe so. But surely competition plays some part in the political process, weeding out the worst of these 'affable fools'? A new NBER working paper by Timothy Besley, Torsten Persson and Daniel Sturm, Political Competition and Economic Performance: Theory and Evidence from the United States, finds that it does:
One of the most cherished propositions in economics is that market competition by and large raises consumer welfare. But whether political competition has similarly virtuous consequences is far less discussed. This paper formulates a model to explain why political competition may enhance economic performance and uses the United States as a testing ground for the model's implications. It finds statistically robust evidence that political competition has quantitatively important effects on state income growth, state policies, and the quality of Governors.
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