Collaborative Research - The Quality of Elected Public Officials: Causes and Consequences.

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

This planning grant will enable two young investigators to complete theoretical studies on the causes and consequences of the quality of the political leadership in representative democracies and develop a program of empirical research to test the theory. The focus is on two dimensions of quality: competence and honesty. A model is developed that captures a rigorous theory of the determinants of the average quality (in terms of competence, honesty, or both) of office holders. The model spotlights incentives to run for office as the key determinant of the quality of the political elite. The most interesting results emerge when such incentives are endogenous. Specifically, if the returns from holding office are increasing in the average quality of office holders, there can be multiple equilibria in office-holders' quality. There are "high" equilibria in which, many office holders being of high quality, it pays for high--quality citizens to run, and "low" equilibria in which, many office holders being of low-quality, high-quality citizens are discouraged from running. The investigators also look more closely at the role that institutions - and especially electoral systems and party organizations - play in determining the average quality of office holders. In the model, the citizen-candidates differ from one another not only in terms of quality but also in terms of ideological position (on a uni-dimensional policy space) and intensity of policy preferences vs. quality preferences. There is a party for each ideological position and the party leaders choose the candidates in each district. The model allows the investigators to consider a variety of electoral systems and includes a description of the ex post coalition formation game taking place in the Parliament if no party achieves the absolute majority. A preliminary result in this rich framework is that if most voters have a high intensity of policy preferences (caring less about quality), then plurality rule always creates incentives for party leaders to select high--quality candidates, whereas under proportional representation there exist equilibria with low average quality of office holders. The project also begins a large-scale data collection effort aimed at documenting variation across countries in the average quality of the political leadership. While cross-country data on corruption already exist, comparable data on office holders' skills have not been heretofore available: this project aims to fill this gap. The project will start collecting information by country on elected officials' education, previous profession, previous income and social status. These proxies for office holders' ability can be used to test and/or inform theories of the determinants of office holders' quality, as well as to investigate its consequences.