Who Becomes a Politician?

Ernesto Dal Bó, Frederico Finan (), Olle Folke, Torsten Persson () and Johanna Rickne

No 23120, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 paper 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 tradeoff 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.

JEL-codes: H10 H70 J45 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-soc
Note: DEV PE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (105)

Published as Ernesto Dal Bó & Frederico Finan & Olle Folke & Torsten Persson & Johanna Rickne, 2017. "Who Becomes A Politician?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 132(4), pages 1877-1914.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23120.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Who Becomes A Politician? (2017)
Working Paper: Who Becomes a Politican? (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23120

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23120

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().