We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set
of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate
model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and
political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have
previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly,
increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs
are sufficiently high.