Mediocrities and Turkish Politics

In the opening lines of Peter Schaffer's play Amadeus, Salieri complains to a priest, “Mediocrities everywhere”. He is lamenting in fact about his own mediocrity more than anyone else’s, as his music is forgotten, while Mozart’s is cherished less than a decade after his untimely death. As I watch PM Erdogan’s Kasimpasa-style bickering with media mogul Aydin Dogan, I find myself repeating Salieri’s words over and over again. I then remembered that I couldn’t find anyone worthy enough to bother to cast a vote for in the July 2007 elections (it turns out that not showing up for an election is also rational since the marginal vote cannot affect an election, as Tim Hartford illustrates in his latest book, The Logic of Life), and a couple long-forgotten papers suddenly popped up inside my head…

Tim Besley, in a 2005 survey paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (19, 43-60) summarizes the economics literature on the decision of individuals to enter politics (if you follow my blog long enough, you’ll soon discover that economists like to poke their noses into many places); one lesson learned from the paper is that mediocre politicians are the rule rather than the exception in many countries. In fact, a more recent paper by Andrea Mattozzi and Antonio Merlo (PIER working paper, 07-007) on the same subject is aptly titled Mediocracy. In their framework with two sectors competing for workers, the political party and lobbyists (this could easily be replaced by a private sector), aspiring politicians with higher skills increase the cost to the party of the average recruit, and so are avoided. Moreover, an increase in the skills of the lobbying sector relative to the party decreases the skills of the best politician- maybe one of the negative side effects of the increases in productivity in Turkey after the 2001 crisis. Joking aside, I think that to explain mediocrity in Turkish politics, one needs to consider non-economic factors as well. Although I do not read much political science, one of the most thought-provoking books I read in 2006 was Haluk Ozdalga’s Kotu Yonetilen Turkiye: Ornek Vaka Turkiye, where the author, one of the princes of the late Ecevit before falling sour with him, recounts his hard-to-believe experiences in the party. You can find a review of the book by a friend of mine at http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=ktp&haberno=4967 – incidentally, I had read the book upon my friend’s suggestion and emailed a somewhat less favorable review than his to the author at the time, but I feel I am closer to his viewpoint now. That’s what overexposure to Turkish politics for a prolonged time can do to you…