Representative democracies are frequently said to need competent men and women to function effectively. However, this argument hinges on a range of premises, including how parties promote candidates and how voters value them. For example, party leaders may be reluctant to promote talent in their party if this threatens their own position. Such reluctance may create a vicious circle of mediocrity where low-quality leaders select low-quality followers in order to cement their position. Cozy arrangements between mediocre leaders and candidates can be shaken up in a variety of ways. One interesting possibility, that we study in this paper, is the introduction of quotas on the gender composition of candidates.More than 100 countries have introduced some form of gender quota in their electoral systems. The merits of these policies remain hotly debated in the academic

Small parties play an important role in proportional election systems. For example, the emergence and electoral success of environmental and anti-immigration parties have constituted one of the central changes in the political landscape in Europe over the last three decades. But we do not know if this has actually had any implications for policy, since no methods exist for credibly estimating the effect of legislative representation in proportional election systems. Because party representation is not randomly assigned, both observable and unobservable factors influence policy outcomes as well as party representation. Using a part of the legislative seat allocation that is as good as random, I estimate the causal effect of party representation on immigration policy, environmental policy and tax policy in Swedish municipalities. The results show that party representation has a large effect on the first two policies, but not on the tax policy.JEL Codes: H5, H7

This paper examines whether control of patronage jobs significantly increased a political party's probability of winning elections in U.S. states. We employ a differences-in-differencs design, exploiting the fact that there is considerable variation in the dates different states adopted civil service reforms. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that political parties in U.S. states were able to use patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of their state legislatures and statewide executive offices. We also find evidence that an "entrenched" party in power for a longer time period can use patronage more effectively than a non-entrenched party. We consider several alternative hypotheses that might plausibly account for the patterns in the data, but find no evidence to support them.

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.