What Makes a Good Politician? Reassessing the Criteria Used for Political Recruitment

Abstract

Certain societal groups are significantly overrepresented within politics, including men, ethnic majority groups, and socioeconomic elites. This has fueled debates regarding meritocracy within political recruitment. While meritocracy is desirable, its definition and measurement are contested. The criteria used in theoretical and empirical academic studies differ from those of political parties and voters, as discussed below. Furthermore, there is bias in favor of the male status quo, with all groups preferring the qualities of existing elites. The definition of a “good” politician is therefore highly subjective. Nonetheless, political traditionalists claim that the “best” candidate should be selected even if this leads to significant gender imbalance in parliaments. Yet, if political recruitment is biased in favor of social elites, the overrecruitment of men may not derive solely from merit (Murray 2014). Without definitive criteria for evaluating prospective candidates and judging those already elected, we cannot determine whether political recruitment is meritocratic.

The gender politics of executive candidate selection and reselection

“…3 The first set of variables included in this multivariate analysis identifies candidates' quality, as traditionally measured by extant scholarship (for a review, see Murray 2015). This sub-sample allows us to examine candidates at a similar departing point, since individuals having previously run for this position may have acquired more political seniority.…”

“…To account for the potential non-independence of observations, the standard errors are clustered on region. 3 The first set of variables included in this multivariate analysis identifies candidates' quality, as traditionally measured by extant scholarship (for a review, see Murray 2015). To explore the relevance of various types of political experience, we include several dichotomous variables coding whether the candidate had (1) or had not (0) served in local, regional and national public office, including both legislative and ministerial experience, and a continuous variable measuring seniority in public office at any tier of government (years, logged).…”

A factor analysis of characterization of “Politician” criteria by different generations in Mongolia

“…In the following paper, we used open data of respondents' age and clustered them into four generations. Literature reveals that exactness in generation theories [4] hardly exists and varies among scholars and the range of age [5] [6] varies from one society to another 1 . In order to choose the appropriate range for each generation in Mongolia, we reviewed domestic scholarly works on intergenerational studies.…”

“…Setting criteria for a politician is highly subjective [1] and controversial since the criteria used in theoretical studies are not necessarily concurrent with the criteria used by voters [2].…”

Rules of Ministerial Recruitment

“…Also, constitutional reform to create an elected, representative House of Lords would strengthen the legitimacy of that ministerial eligibility pool where women are 'thriving' (Eason 2010). To address the informal, generalist rules of ministerial qualification, governments should introduce a formal job descriptions for ministers, coupled with a formal process of application (see Annesley 2014 andMurray 2014).…”