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来源类型 | Working Paper |
规范类型 | 报告 |
DOI | 10.3386/w23120 |
来源ID | Working Paper 23120 |
Who Becomes a Politician? | |
Ernesto Dal Bó; Frederico Finan; Olle Folke; Torsten Persson; Johanna Rickne | |
发表日期 | 2017-02-06 |
出版年 | 2017 |
语种 | 英语 |
摘要 | 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. |
主题 | Public Economics ; Subnational Fiscal Issues ; Labor Economics ; Labor Market Structures ; Other ; Economic Systems |
URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w23120 |
来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
引用统计 | |
资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/580794 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Ernesto Dal Bó,Frederico Finan,Olle Folke,et al. Who Becomes a Politician?. 2017. |
条目包含的文件 | ||||||
文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
w23120.pdf(1691KB) | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 |
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