Choosing Your Pond: A Structural Model of Political Power Sharing
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Abstract
I develop a model of party formation that explains within-party rent sharing, political selection, and party stability. Parties generate club goods through their control over government functions. Politicians share their political rents with party leaders in exchange for accessing parties’ club goods. I estimate the model for Turkey with a dataset of all listed politicians between 1995 and 2014. I find that the right-wing parties accumulate club goods more easily than they produce rents, which leads to strong party control. Counterfactual exercises provide insights on the institutions that improve the quality of politicians and prevent concentration of power