Political Selection

Political Science for Public Policy

Joachim Wehner
Overview

• Why care about political selection?

• Who becomes a politician?
• Generalist or technocrat?
• Do policy-makers matter and, if so, how?
Why care about political selection

• Good government depends on institutions that incentivize politicians

to act in the public interest, but also on selecting competent and
honest politicians in the first place (Besley 2006).
• The policies that politicians can credibly commit to depend on who is
chosen for public office.
• Voters care about the quality of politicians (making it a “valence”
issue), principally honesty and competence.
• Elections offer an opportunity to maximize quality, as opposed to
drawing lots, heredity, or use of force.
Elections enhance the quality of politicians
• Besley and Reynal-Querol (2011) analyse data for 1468 leaders in 197
countries between 1848 and 2004.
• Democracies are around 20% more likely than non-democracies to
select leaders with a graduate education.
• Galasso and Nannicini (2011) examine the quality of Italian MPs in
and the competitiveness of districts between 1994 and 2006.
• Competition increases quality, e.g. an additional year of schooling
increases the probability of a party deploying a candidate to a
contestable district without an incumbent by 2.6 percentage points.
What makes ”good” candidates more likely?
• To make elections work as a mechanism to select good politicians,
Besley (2006) draws attention to four factors:
• Attractiveness - motivation to run for office
• Success - likelihood of election
• Opportunity cost - relevant outside options
• Accountability - reelection rate
• We want elections to work in such a way that they reward “good”
politicians relative to “bad” ones.
• Who becomes a politician? (see also Gulzar 2021)
Source: Delayed Gratification 36, July - September 2019, https://www.slow-journalism.com/infographics/infographic-how-to-be-british-prime-minister
Who becomes a politician (1)
• Dal Bo et al. (2017) exploit a unique dataset of all elected and non-
elected individual candidates for national or municipal office in
Sweden from 1982-2010 (over 200,000).
• Linked to detailed population registers for the whole adult
population, earnings data from tax authorities, and results from
military enlistment tests of the mental capacities of Swedish men.
• How do the characteristics of politicians relate to the population that
they represent?
Who becomes a politician (2)
• Their findings characterize an “inclusive meritocracy”:
• A positive relationship between ability and political power
• Individual ability matters for selection
• Representation of social background is even
• A weak trade-off between ability and inclusive social representation
• These results occur in a supportive context:
• Well-paid positions and strong intrinsic motivation
• Parties working to represent various segments of society
• Universal high-quality education ensuring talent across social classes
Ministerial selection
• So far, we have looked at generic measures of skills, but what about
the match between specific technical skills and policymaking roles?
• Lawyers as justice ministers?
• Medical doctors as health ministers?
• Economists as finance ministers?
(Hallerberg and Wehner 2020)

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Finance Minister, Nigeria
2003-2006, 2011-2015
Appointment decisions
• Why is it not the norm to put economists in charge of economic
policy?
• An “expert” may have more authority in the cabinet and with civil
servants but may lack “political” skills within party and with voters.
• A “generalist” may be more sensitive to the political pressures facing
the leader.
• If leaders prefer a more political appointee to a technocratic one,
under what conditions would the leader’s preferences be reversed?
Financial crises and partisanship
• Government needs the confidence of investors and voters.
• During a financial crisis, the appointment of an economist may signal
the person knows what she is doing and can push through reform.
• In financial crises, are leaders more likely to appoint trained economists as
finance minister or central bank head?
• Are they less likely to appoint those with backgrounds in private finance?
• Left traditionally appeals to labor, but needs the confidence of capital,
so the appointment of economists can assure markets.
• Are leaders from the left more likely to appoint trained economists as finance
minister or central bank head?
Pandemics and the selection of health ministers
Jens Spahn, German minister of health Karl Lauterbach, German minister of
from 2018-2021 health since 2021

Trained as a banker and studied political Professor of health economics and

science clinical epidemiology
So, when do you get “technocrats”?
• Some countries are systematically more likely to appoint
“technocrats” as policy-makers than others.
• Form of government affects the talent pool for cabinet appointments
• Different patterns across mature and more recent democracies
• But there is also variation within countries and across governments.
• A crisis may increase demand for (the right type of) relevant expertise
• When governments need to signal technical competence
Do policy-makers “matter”?
• How assess whether policy-makers matter for policy or outcomes?
• Causal effects are difficult to identify, since – as we just saw – the selection
of policy-makers typically is not random.
• One approach is to test whether individual leader “fixed effects” are
statistically significant or not.
• Another approach has been to exploit as-if random variation in the timing
of leadership transitions.
• In the literature we review in the following slides, this involves comparisons
of 5-year periods prior to and following such transitions.
Leaders and growth (1)
• Jones and Olken (2005) focus on 57
post-WWII leader transitions due to
natural causes or accidents, assuming
their timing was as-if random.
• They show that these transitions
relate to changes in growth and
monetary policy (inflation).
• This pattern is strongest in
autocracies, where leaders are less
constrained than in democracies.

Source: Jones and Olken (2005), Figure 1. Showing rule of Mao in China; Machel in Mozambique; Touré in Guinea; and Khomeini in Iran.
Leaders and growth (2)

Source: Besley et al. (2011) replicate Jones and Olken’s analysis with data for about 1000 political leaders between 1875 and 2004.
Leaders and growth (3)
• But which personal characteristics matter and how do they affect policy?
• Besley et al. (2011) find that the growth effects of randomly-timed
transitions depend on the educational attainment of leaders:
• The departure of a leader with a college education reduces average growth in the
following 5 years by .7 percentage points.
• Swapping a leader with a graduate education for one without reduces growth by 2.1
percentage points per year in the post-transition window.
• However, Carnes and Lupu (2016) find that these effects are fragile.
Leaders and growth (4)

Source: Besley et al. (2011).

Leaders and pandemics (1)
"The contrast between Ms Merkel’s performance and those of the populists demonstrates that an ability to
understand evidence is a useful trait in a leader. The German chancellor has a doctorate in chemistry. By
contrast, Mr Trump is a real estate developer, Mr Bolsonaro is a former army captain and Mr Johnson has a
second-class degree in classics.”
Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times, June 29, 2020

Q: "What grade would you give [the UK for its response to Covid-19]?"
A: "I think you're a 'B'... But when you compare what is happening in Germany, where people responded
brilliantly... The difference there [is] the country is led by a physicist. People talk about this as being about
women leading and that's the important thing. Maybe there is something to that, too. I think the more
important thing is if you have people who are evidence-based, irrespective of their sex."
W. Ian Lipkin, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University, on BBC Radio 4, June 3, 2020
Leaders and pandemics (2)
• During the Covid-19 pandemic, policy responses differed substantially
across countries, even those with similar capacity to respond.
• An important decision at the start of the pandemic was whether and how
quickly to lock down in order to prevent deaths.
• The context allows us to examine whether leaders with relevant training
where quicker to act, while containing some threats to valid inference.
• Notably, reverse causality is ruled out, as leaders in office at the start of the
pandemic were not selected for their expertise in handling pandemics.
• Data are available for many countries, which helps to contain concerns
about sample selection bias.
 Biology and biochemistry 1

Environmental science 1

Earth science 1

Physics 2

Chemistry 3

Medicine 9

Military and defense 19

Economics 30

Political science and civics 33

Law 35

Management and administration 38

0 10 20 30 40
Number of leaders with degree including ISCED detailed field
(January 2020)

Source: Wehner, J. and M. Hallerberg (2021). ‘Pandemic leadership: beware of anecdotes’, Bruegel Blog, 11 May, https://www.bruegel.org/2021/05/pandemic-leadership-beware-of-anecdotes/.
 (a) Scientist (b) Woman (c) Populist

1.0

1.0

1.0
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9

Probability of nationwide stay at home measure

Probability of nationwide stay at home measure

Probability of nationwide stay at home measure

No
Yes
0.0

0.0

0.0
0 100 200 300 366 0 100 200 300 366 0 100 200 300 366
Days from January 1, 2020 Days from January 1, 2020 Days from January 1, 2020
Number at risk Number at risk Number at risk
No 156 38 23 18 16 No 156 39 24 18 17 No 152 37 22 17 15
Yes 13 3 3 2 2 Yes 13 2 2 2 1 Yes 17 4 4 3 3

Source: Wehner, J. and M. Hallerberg (2021). ‘Pandemic leadership: beware of anecdotes’, Bruegel Blog, 11 May, https://www.bruegel.org/2021/05/pandemic-leadership-beware-of-anecdotes/.
Two leaders with doctorates in chemistry and with
diametrically opposed pandemic responses

John Magufuli, President of Tanzania Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany

from 2015-2021 from 2005-2021 (in earlier years)
Leaders and pandemics (3)
• In this case, we do not find that certain leader traits noted in the press and
by commentators played an important role.
• Many of these traits are rare, which makes it difficult to evaluate their role.
• The mistake was to select on the dependent variable, focus on a few high-
profile leaders and conjecture about salient attributes.
• Research design may help, e.g. matching approaches, but with further
assumptions or challenges (Garikipati and Kambhampati 2021).
• This does not mean that leadership did not matter – it almost certainly did
– but that, as social scientists, we should beware of fashionable anecdotes.
A growing field
• Using similar methods as well as an expanding toolkit, the empirical
study of leadership effects in politics is rapidly growing.
• Examples include studies of leader effects on:
• Democratization (Gift and Krcmaric 2015)
• Legislative productivity and corruption (Carnes and Lupu 2016)
• Fossil fuel taxes and subsidies (Martinez-Alvarez et al. 2022)
• Audit outcomes (Berliner et al. 2023)
Concluding thoughts
• While social scientists have worried a great deal about institutional
design, the systematic study of political selection is more recent.
• The “type” of policy-maker can be important for both normative and
instrumental reasons:
• Some find it desirable to ensure broad-based representation
• Who is in charge can matter for policy and outcomes we care about
• Empirical work shows that leaders “matter” at least for some
outcomes and that the characteristics of leaders matter, too.
• We should worry most about the quality of policy-makers when they
have substantial decision-making autonomy (see also Shepsle 2010).
References
Berliner, D., Haus, M. and Wehner, J. (2023). “Do Ministers Matter for Audit Performance? Evidence from Cabinet Appointments During South
Africa’s ‘State of Capture’.” ODI Working Paper (January 2023). London, ODI.
Besley, T. (2005). "Political Selection." Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(3): 43-60.
Besley, T., and M. Reynal-Querol (2011). "Do Democracies Select More Educated Leaders?" American Political Science Review 105(3): 552-566.
Besley, T., J. G. Montalvo and M. Reynal-Querol (2011). "Do Educated Leaders Matter?" Economic Journal 121(554): F205-227.
Carnes, N., and N. Lupu (2016). "What Good Is a College Degree? Education and Leader Quality Reconsidered." Journal of Politics 78(1): 35-49.
Dal Bó, E., et al. (2017). "Who Becomes a Politician?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 132(4): 1877-1914.
Garikipati, S., and U. Kambhampati (2021). "Leading the Fight Against the Pandemic: Does Gender Really Matter?" Feminist Economics 27(1-2):
401-418.
Galasso, V., and T. Nannicini (2011). "Competing on Good Politicians." American Political Science Review 105(1): 79-99.
Gift, T. and D. Krcmaric (2015). "Who Democratizes? Western-educated Leaders and Regime Transitions." Journal of Conflict Resolution 61(3):
671-701.
Gulzar, S. (2021). "Who Enters Politics and Why?" Annual Review of Political Science 24(1): 253-275.
Hallerberg, M., and J. Wehner (2020). "When Do You Get Economists as Policy Makers?" British Journal of Political Science 50(3): 1193-1205.
Jones, B. F., and B. A. Olken (2005). "Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II." Quarterly Journal of Economics
120(3): 835-864.
Martinez-Alvarez, C. B. , et al. (2022). “Political Leadership Has Limited Impact on Fossil Fuel Taxes and Subsidies.” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 119(47): e2208024119
Shepsle, K. A. (2010). Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions. New York, W.W. Norton. Chapter 14.