Policy Sabotage and the Competence Curse

Can a more competent government produce worse policy outcomes? In a dynamic two-party model, an office-motivated opposition can sabotage reform. Greater competence improves policy selection but also makes successful reform more electorally threatening, inducing more sabotage. Voter welfare therefore depends on effective competence: the incumbent's informational advantage multiplied by reform's survival probability. When sabotage responds sufficiently elastically near full competence, welfare is maximized at an intermediate level; this result ranks informational environments rather than prescribing lower competence. For sufficiently impatient parties, the competence-failure ordering survives jointly more precise signals for both parties and asymmetric priors; it also holds locally under weak partisan motives. Imperfect detection by voters can sustain a no-sabotage equilibrium when the detection probability reaches a competence-dependent threshold, but the threshold rises with competence. Voter ignorance can therefore both reward sabotage and make competent governments harder to protect from sabotage.