Who Becomes A Politician?*

Abstract

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capital, selecting on competence may lead to uneven representation. This article examines patterns of political selection among the universe of municipal politicians and national legislators in Sweden, using extraordinarily rich data on competence traits and social background for the entire population. We document four new facts that together characterize an “inclusive meritocracy.” First, politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent. Second, this positive selection is present even when conditioning on family (and hence social) background, suggesting that individual competence is key for selection. Third, the representation of social background, whether measured by parental earnings or occupational social class, is remarkably even. Fourth, there is at best a weak trade-off in selection between competence and social representation, mainly due to strong positive selection of politicians of low (parental) socioeconomic status. A broad implication of these facts is that it is possible for democracy to generate competent and socially representative leadership.

Rank effects in political promotions

“…Finally, and more broadly speaking, our results contribute to the literature on political selection (Besley 2005), in particular, how election systems influence political selection (Carey and Shugart 1995;Beath et al 2016;Braendle 2016) and what personal characteristics are associated with political selection into various offices (Dal Bó et al 2017). …”

“…We also contribute to the literature on political selection and the design of electoral systems more generally. First, it is interesting to compare both causal ) and descriptive (Dal Bó et al 2017) evidence on political promotions in Sweden to our results from Finland, as those countries are otherwise very similar, but differ in electoral systems, with Sweden having a semi-open and Finland a pure open list system.…”

Popularity Shocks and Political Selection

“…This is in line with previous research showing that parties select better candidates when they need them, namely during more competitive elections (Galasso and Nannicini, 2011;Mattozzi and Merlo, 2015). Importantly, this intuition is supported by the suggestive results of Table OA.1 and other more accurate studies showing that educated individuals are more likely to be elected (Dal Bó et al, 2017). On the other hand, elections become less risky when the local government experiences a positive shock, such as reporting no or little corruption.…”

“…Indeed, there is a large literature showing that voters primarily care about competence when picking an elected officer (Kinder et al, 1980;Todorov et al, 2005). Importantly, there is also empirical evidence that education -which we use as a proxy for competence -is a valid predictor of electoral success (Dal Bó et al, 2017). Our findings confirm this evidence.…”

Electoral Institutions and Intraparty Cohesion

“…In this paper, we study how institutions affect organizations' structure via the channel of recruitment (e.g., Besley, Folke, Persson, and Rickne 2017;Dal Bo, Finan, Folke, Persson, and Rickne 2017;Folke and Rickne 2017). In particular, we focus on political parties and explore, both theoretically and empirically, how electoral institutions shape parties' strategic incentives at the stage of candidate selection.…”