Political Selection with Pessimistic Voters

I analyze political agency models with potentially two equilibria, one in which elections are e¤ective selection mechanisms and only "good" individuals participate in politics and another one in which elections are not e¤ective and "bad" individuals participate in politics. These equilibria are self-ful.lling prophecies: if citizens expect a low-quality political class, bad individuals will participate and the political class will have low quality. If citizens expect a high-quality political class, only good individuals will have incentives to participate and the political class will be of high quality. The model exhibits only the good equilibrium if the proportion of good individuals in the society is su¢ ciently high. I analyze the impact of popularity shocks and redistribution on the set of equilibria.