Competing on Good Politicians

By Vincenzo Galasso, T. Nannicini. American Political Science Review, 2009

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Is electoral competition good for political selection? To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model where ideological parties select and allocate high-valence (experts) and low-valence (party loyalists) candidates into electoral districts. Voters care about a national policy (e.g., party ideology) and the valence of their district's candidates. High-valence candidates are more costly for the parties to recruit. We show that parties compete by selecting and allocating good politicians to the most contestable districts. Empirical evidence on Italian members of parliament confirms this prediction: politicians with higher ex ante quality, measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and local government experience, are more likely to run in contestable districts. Indeed, despite being different on average, politicians belonging to opposite political coalitions converge to high-quality levels in close electoral races. Furthermore, politicians elected in contestable districts have fewer absences in parliament, due to a selection effect more than to reelection incentives.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c339b686149538b0d5090d105f65d100e76f2125

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Who Becomes a Politician (2017, neutral): “Examples include Besley, Pande, and Rao (2005), Ferraz and Finan (2009), Galasso and Nannicini (2011), Beath et al. (2014), Tillmann (2014), Jia, Kudamatsu, and Seim (2015), and Folke and Rickne (2016). n lo a d e d fro m h ttp s ://a c a d e m ic .o u p .c o m /q je /a rtic le /1 3 2 /4 /1 8 7 7…”
The perfect finance minister: Whom to appoint as finance minister to balance the budget? (2014, positive): “Galasso and Nannicini (2011) find a similar effect for the Italian parliament and furthermore show that politicians from opposing political coalitions - with different qualification levels on average - converge to high levels of qualification in highly contested electoral districts.”
Law Enforcement, Municipal Budgets and Spillover Effects: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Italy (2017, background): “The latter relies on the assumption that education level is positively related to competency (Galasso and Nannicini, 2011; Besley et al., 2011).”
Gender Quotas and the Quality of Politicians (2014, neutral): “…Such choice of the dependent variable is motivated by the potential correlation of labor market ability and skills in the political arena (Galasso and Nannicini, 2011).27 A higher proportion of politicians whose previous occupation is skill-intensive would be interpreted as an indicator…”
Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil (2012, background): “Looking at different outcomes, the share of unaligned voters has been shown to be positively correlated with presidential campaigning in the US (Stromberg, 2008) and the quality of politicians in Italy (Galasso and Nannicini, 2011).”
The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions (2016, background): “4 Galasso and Nannicini (2011) examine how party organizations allocate political candidates across Italian districts and find that parties field more educated candidates in more competitive districts.”
How Do Voters Respond to Information? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign (2013, neutral): “The ML procedure relies on directly fitting individual vote declarations, which— in Section 4—we have shown to closely match actual vote outcomes.(27) The specification selection warrants some discussion, however.”