There are some "problems"
of choosing Politicians,
which can lead to inefficiencies in themselves. The two main parts
of hiring someone are: 1) choosing
candidates, and 2) deciding
which candidates will be hired. Rather than an examination, a
set of election rules are used to choose people. Deciding how
the candidate wins can be done a number of ways, such as the plurality
rule. There are numerous ways, but what is important is that the
costs of selecting a winner be minimized, and that the voters
like the winner. This would lead to greater efficiency with every
sense of the word.
However, voters never have complete information about candidates.
Therefore they never know if their voting choices are "correct,"
and agents who are hired by the collective have the potential
to do great damage by abusing their power. In a sense, the very
fact that there is assymetric information demonstrates that there
could never really be optimal results from voting, and that a
democratic system is not efficient. Without all information, how
could the optimal results ever be obtained? One way to help get
information on the candidates is to allow free press-freedom of
speech. But of course these do not eliminate all of the inefficiencies.
Furthermore, once in office a candidate may change their promises.
Plus the demands of voters may change, which would make the previously
elected official less suitable. To avoid costs of regret term
limits seem appropriate. However, then again, we can't have term
limits being too short because having reelections too often would
be costly since negotiation is costly. Already we can see how
voting may lead to inefficiencies.