This paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democ- racies. It extends the model of democratic policy making developed in our earlier paper (Besley and Coate (1995)) to a simple dynamic environment. Equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that in each period, conditional on future policies being selected through the democratic process, there exists no alternative current policy choices which can raise the expected utilities of all citizens. However, policies which would be declared efficient by standard economic criteria are not necessarily adopted in political equilibrium. The paper argues that these divergencies are legitimately viewed as "political failures".