Replacing politicians doesn't always make them work harder. Sometimes it just finds better ones.

A new paper finds that replacing politicians does not always force them to work harder. Sometimes, voters just end up replacing bad actors with good ones, rather than making the bad ones change their ways.

For a long time, people assumed that if voters could replace politicians, those politicians would try harder to do a good job. This paper shows that sometimes, replacement just means voters eventually pick a good politician, not that the bad ones learned their lesson. This means the act of voting might be more about finding good people than about forcing bad people to improve. The paper suggests that in some economic situations, even with elections, politicians can keep shirking for a long time.