Electoral competition and politician turnover

In this paper, we analyze the selection by opportunistic parties of the can didates who run for election. We consider a setting with incomplete but sym metric information about the candidates' abilities, in which electoral camp aigns provide voters with additional information about candidates. Parties care only about selecting an appropriate candidate to win the election, whi le voters elect the best candidate conditional on their information. We fir st argue that in order to defeat an established very good candidate of its rival, a party may favor a new candidate with highly uncertain ability, rat her than an established good candidate. Next, we establish that the discrep ancy between the objective of parties and the objective of the electorate l eads to inefficient conservatism in the selection of candidates, i.e. each party keeps its incumbents too often from the voters' viewpoint. (C) 2001 E lsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D72; D81.