Electoral competition and political selection: An analysis of the activity of French deputies, 1958–2012

Abstract

In this paper, we study the relation between electoral competition and political selection, using a unique dataset containing detailed yearly information about members of the French National Assembly from 1958 to 2012. First, we innovate by using activity as a proxy for politicians' quality. As we gathered information on the many aspects of deputies' individual work, we use a nonparametric composite indicator of deputy activity that fully acknowledges the multidimensional nature of parliamentary work. Second, we do not impose any assumption about the relationship between electoral competition and political selection by using a fully nonparametric framework. Third, this method allows studying the evolution of the relationship between electoral competition and political selection over time. Overall, our results show that deputies elected in a priori contested districts have a higher overall activity, with the intensity of this relationship reaching its peak in the 80's but constantly decreasing since then.

Who are the ‘ghost’ MPs? Evidence from the French parliament

“…This is a prevalent situation (51% of the deputies in the dataset have a municipal mandate in parallel), which is at the center of public debates for decades and suspected to be a major cause of low parliamentary implication (see Bach, 2011;François and Weill, 2014). Finally, Galasso and Nannicini (2011) suggest that the ex ante level of political competition impacts the quality of politicians that parties recruit, which is evidenced in the case of the French deputies by Gavoille and Verschelde (2017). Competition is a measure based on the Herfindahl index of the vote shares at the first round at the previous election.…”

“…(2011) and Gavoille and Verschelde (2017) for instance, presents several advantages compared to a measure based on the vote margin. First, because of the two-round electoral system, the decisive round is not everywhere the same.…”

“…It remains possible that a deputy would have the same contribution to the debates if he/she was away. To avoid this problem, Arnold et al (2014) and Gavoille and Verschelde (2017) propose measures of performance based on activity: what matters is thus what MPs actually do. Still, even with such measures, it remains complicated, if not impossible, to assess the quality of each single piece of an MP's work.…”

“…As illustrated above, problems related to shirking behaviours are far from being a recent phenomenon, but the characteristics of the ghost deputies may be different depending on the period. For instance, Gavoille and Verschelde (2017) observe a time-varying relationship between electoral competition and the activity of the French deputies. For this reason, I exploit the relatively large time span of the dataset to check whether the variables characterizing ghost deputies 50 years ago are the same variables as for the current ones.…”

“…The major problem with these measures is that a politician might look good simply by sleeping on the bench of Parliament. Arnold et al (2014), Gavoille and Verschelde (2017) and Hurka et al (2017) propose measures of performance based on MPs' parliamentary activity, i.e., on what deputies actually do within the Parliament. But contrary to these papers, the simple measure binary measure I use allows to isolate a set of MPs that fail to fulfil their duty 3 .…”