If Competition Is Tough Politicians Are Good
If you want good politicians, design contestable electoral districts, Vincenzo Galasso and Tommaso Nannicini (both Department of Economics) suggest in Competing on Good Politicians, an article forthcoming in American Political Science Review. Electoral competition improves political outcomes by leading to the selection of better politicians, they find checking a model of political selection in a majoritarian system against a dataset of Italian members of parliament elected in majoritarian districts from 1994 to 2006.
In their model political parties select the candidates and decide how to allocate them to the districts in order to maximise the likelihood to win the elections. Parties can recruit high-quality candidates (expert and rated competent by the voters, but costly in terms of compensation and risk of non-alignment to the party line) and loyalists (easy to recruit and reliable, but with no personal appeal to the voters). The model forecasts that the parties will allocate the best candidates to the most contestable districts, reserving the safe districts for the loyalists.
The two scholars spot a dataset apt to check their model analyzing the outcomes of Italian elections from 1994 to 2006, when 75% of the parliamentarian seats used to be assigned in majoritarian (single-member) districts following the plurality rule. They use personal data on the members of Parliament elected in the single-member districts to rate their quality (years of schooling, previous market income controlled for the job and past experience in local government being its indicators), data on previous elections to measure the degree of contestability of the districts and data on abstenteeism in electronic vote to check the ex-post behaviour of the elected members.
They find that, as stated by the model, both the right and the left Italian coalitions allocate the best candidates to the most contestable districts. Even if the average right-wing and left-wing candidates differ in terms of schooling, profession and political experience, their characteristics become strikingly similar when only the candidates in the most contestable districts are considered. Furthermore, their quality as measured ex-ante manifests itself ex-post in a lower abstenteeism rate.
"Our results have normative implications", Galasso and Nannicini conclude. "They encourage the adoption of institutions and policies aimed at enhancing both political competition and voters' information on the quality of individual candidates".
The authors developed the normative implications in a recent article in lavoce.info. They imagine minor interventions in non-contestable bordering electoral districts repeatedly won by different coalitions in the years 1994-2006. Switching a few municipalities from one district to another, contestability (and therefore the quality of elected officials) could clearly improve, as in the case of the Agrigento and Sciacca districts, which they bring as proof of the feasibility of the change.