How Evil Are Politicians?

Bryan Caplan's public choice analysis of politician behavior — arguing that politicians are neither especially virtuous nor especially evil, but are constrained by political incentives that systematically produce bad policy.

Public choice political psychology: politicians respond to incentives like anyone else — they do what gets them elected, not what is good policy. Caplan argues this makes them 'moderately evil' at worst — constrained enough by institutional checks and electoral accountability to prevent the worst outcomes, but systematically biased toward policies that appeal to voters' irrational biases (which Caplan documented in The Myth of the Rational Voter).