Political Disclosure and Electoral Selection

How is the desire of citizens to run for local public office influenced by the existence of disclosure laws and how do citizens trade them off with other institutional arrangements like wages or discretion in office? This paper explores how different types of potential citizen candidates (pro-social vs. rent motivated) value and trade off these different dimensions and how it influences the quality of the candidate pool (measured by education). We first elicit preferences for national disclosure regulation and lobby rules using two conjoints experiments. Second, using a factorial experiment, we randomly vary hypothetical local office rules and study their effects on the desire of respondents to run for local office.