Political Selection
2020. "Mitigating Adverse Political Selection: Experimental Evidence from a Leadership Training for Aspiring Politicians in the Philippines."
Abstract. Good political leaders matter for governance outcomes. Yet incompetent and dishonest candidates get elected simply because low-quality citizens are more likely to select into politics than their high-quality counterparts. Can leadership training with performance-based incentives screen and motivate high-quality citizens to choose politics? We randomly assigned 569 would-be politicians in the Philippines into no training, training with unconditional awards (T1), and training with performance-based awards (T2). We find that, five years later, only in T2 are low public-minded and low-aptitude subjects less likely to run for office than their control group counterparts. These results highlight how prototypical mechanism designs in economics can help mitigate adverse selection in politics. Democratic Accountability
2020. Ravanilla, Nico, Michael Davidson and Allen Hicken. "Voting in Clientelistic Social Networks: Evidence from the Philippines." Under review.
Abstract. In clientelistic environments, voters want to know which politicians are most likely to deliver on targeted benefits. We argue that in these contexts voters use their social proximity with candidates as heuristics to inform vote choice. To test our theory, we rely on local naming conventions to reconstruct family networks spanning one whole city in the Philippines, and asses blood and marriage links between voters and local candidates. We then collect survey data on pre-election candidate leanings and actual voting behavior of 895 randomly drawn voters. We show that the degrees of separation between voters and candidates explain not only aggregate electoral outcomes but also individual vote choice, controlling for pre-election leanings. We demonstrate that this is because private inducements are channeled through family networks. These findings highlight the electoral importance of social proximity with politicians as an information shortcut when voters are choosing whom to support at the polls.
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