When politicians are provided with insufficient incentives by the democratic election mechanism, social welfare can be improved by threshold contracts. A threshold contract stipulates the performance level that a politician must reach in order to obtain the right to stand for re-election. 'Read...

We consider a model with a politician facing a multi-task problem while in office. The re-election mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favour of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others. We show that a combination of elections and incentive contracts can...