All else equal, society benefits from the election of competent politicians. Under list proportional representation, the world’s most common electoral rule, voter choice is complicated by the presence of partywide electoral lists.
Unless parties rank candidates in decreasing order of competence of these lists, elected politicians are unlikely to be the most competent ones. In ongoing research, we analyze the forces that govern the candidate ranking strategies of parties. This allows us to uncover the conditions under which party choices do not hinder society’s desire to elect the most competent candidates.
Parties wish to use the candidate ranking strategy that maximizes their electoral success. Candidates differ in terms of competence but also exert costly effort to improve their party’s expected electoral success. Our research disentangles incentive issues from those relative to competence. Building on Crutzen, Flamand and Sahuguet (2020), we show that the only candidates who face strong incentives to perform are those at and around the list position that corresponds to the number of seats a party expects to win. Candidates at the top and bottom positions of the list have very little incentives to perform, because they are either very likely or very unlikely to get elected. Then, and especially when competence and motivation reinforce each other (are complements, thus), parties do not rank candidates in decreasing order of competence on their lists. Yet, casual and empirical evidence suggests that parties often put their best candidates at the top of their list.
To reconcile the basic theoretical predictions of the model with the available evidence, we augment our model to allow for several real world features of the electoral game. A prominent one is the fact that nowadays voters have little ideological allegiance to a specific party. More often than not, voters base their vote on their understanding of what each party stands for, understanding they get from media reports, mainly. Several studies have shown that the media are especially interested in scrutinizing the intentions of the top brass of parties. We then find that, when voters care enough about the political programmes of parties and the media are in a position to carry out their preferred strategy, our theory predicts that parties find it in their interests to rank candidates in decreasing order of competence.
Our findings thus suggest that society is more likely to be ruled by the most competent and performing politicians when the ideological bonds between voters and parties are not too strong and the media are free to carry out their business.
Full article is available on Journal of Public Economics
Benoît S Y Crutzen, Sabine Flamand, Nicolas Sahuguet, (2020). “A model of a team contest, with an application to incentives under list proportional representation”, Journal of Public Economics, vol. 182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2019.104109.
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