Elsevier

European Economic Review

Volume 92, February 2017, Pages 180-195
European Economic Review

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

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2016.12.003Get rights and content

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 proposing a measure of deputy activity to obtain insight into political selection. 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. We argue that this measure of activity is positively correlated with competence and intrinsic motivation, two components of politicians' quality. Second, we exploit the large time span of our dataset to study 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.

Introduction

Political economy scholars recently evidenced that individuals, and not only institutions, matter for economic outcomes (Besley et al., 2011, Jones and Olken, 2005). This implies that politicians are not all of the same quality. Admitting differences in quality amounts to acknowledging that the behavior of politicians in office is not only shaped by incentives. This emphasizes the need not only to shape institutions in order to discipline incumbent politicians, but also to design efficient political selection mechanisms. Several theoretical factors have been shown to affect political selection: the wage of politicians (Besley, 2004, Messner and Polborn, 2004, Poutvaara and Takalo, 2007), the transparency of politics (Mattozzi and Merlo, 2007), the institutional flexibility (Acemoglu et al., 2010), and reservation quotas (Besley et al., 2005). In addition to a well-known disciplining effect (Barro, 1973 for instance), electoral competition is also likely to enhance this selection process, by pushing the competing parties to select candidates of higher quality in order to seduce sufficiently enough unaligned voters to ensure electoral success (Galasso and Nannicini, 2011).

This paper extends the empirical investigation between electoral competition and the quality of politicians exploiting a unique dataset focusing on the deputies of the Vth French Republic, from its birth in 1958 to the end of the XIIIth legislature in 2012, covering more than 2,400 deputies for a total of 24,011 observations. The French National Assembly is an ideal testing ground for this in many respects. First, the institutional context remains (quasi) stable since 1958, allowing meaningful comparisons over such a long period. Second, this institutional stability is paired with a highly heterogeneous political context, with left-wing majorities following right-wing ones. Finally, this institutional context fits the theoretical framework of Galasso and Nannicini (2011), which we adopt.

We bring two main contributions to the literature. First, we provide an individual measure of MPs' activity, i.e., of what deputies do. We argue that in our context, activity is a positive function of competence but also of intrinsic motivation, two dimensions defining the quality of a politician, and thus a matter of political selection (Besley, 2005, Besley, 2006). It complements previous research proxying quality by the level of schooling (e.g. Daniele and Geys, 2015, Kotakorpi and Poutvaara, 2011, De Paola and Scoppa, 2011), which is likely to capture competence but not necessarily intrinsic motivation. For this purpose, we gathered from the Assemblée Nationale archive all the information that has been systematically collected over the years for each deputy and for each year from 1958 to 2012: (i) propositions of law, (ii) oral questions, (iii) reports and (iv) debates in which the deputy has been involved in. From these four aspects of parliamentary work, we compute a composite indicator of activity using an α-domination estimator, based on Aragon et al. (2006) and Daraio and Simar (2007). As it is a fully nonparametric estimator, no arbitrary weights are imposed on the different activity items. Compared to proxies such as education, a potential drawback of this activity-based measure is that incentives may also influence the level of effort, affecting activity. As we shall discuss, this issue is mitigated by the inner organization of the parliamentary work, which provides competence-based gatekeeping mechanisms. We further consider this issue by taking into account reelection incentives into the analysis. This activity-based approach thus offers an insightful complement to the existing literature.

To measure political competition, our favorite measure is based on a Herfindahl index of the vote shares at the first round of the legislative elections, as in Larcinese (2014) and De Paola and Scoppa (2011) for instance. After discussing the relevance of this specific measure to the French context, we provide evidence that it is a good indicator of the probability for the jurisdiction to swing at the next election.

The second innovation of our empirical analysis is that we fully exploit the large time span of our dataset to test whether the discussed relationship is time-varying. In France as in Europe, the progressive convergence of the competing political platforms over the second part of the XXth century, marked by the reconciliation of the left with the market in the early 80's, suggests that the electorate became more ideologically neutral, hence more sensitive to the quality of the candidates (Green, 2007, Knapp and Wright, 2001). We test whether the intensity of the competition/selection relationship increased (or not) over time. For this purpose, we adopt a fully nonparametric framework, which provides the warranted flexibility to reveal how this relationship evolved over the half-century covered by our sample. To our knowledge this is the first exploration of drivers of political selection over time.

Overall, our results point a clear positive relationship between electoral competition and political selection. Deputies elected in ex ante competitive districts exhibit a higher level of activity, ceteris paribus, which is not driven by reelection incentives. This relationship is robust to various specifications. The overall activity of deputies is continuously increasing over time, but the intensity of the relationship between competition and quality, after having increased till the early 80's, is continuously decreasing since then, and turns insignificant since the beginning of the 2000's. The political context of the 70's and 80's is the closest one to the theoretical hypothesis of the Galasso and Nannicini (2011) model, providing support to their formalization of the link between competition and selection.

The remaining of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we present the theoretical background. Section 3 describes the French political and institutional context. We introduce our measure of activity and of electoral competition together with the dataset in Section 4. The results are detailed in Sections 5 and 6 concludes.

Section snippets

Related literature

Since at least the seminal work of Downs (1957), the point has been made that political competition influences economic outcomes. More recently, Besley and Preston (2007) have shown that governments elected in a competitive political market tend to be less partisan in their policy-making, respectively in the case of English and Spanish local governments. Besley et al. (2010) propose a model showing that political competition increases the efficiency of implemented policies: reducing the bias

The French institutional context

With a powerful presidency and a prime minister subject to assembly confidence, the French Vth Republic can be described as a semi-presidential system. The Parliament is bicameral, consisting of the Sénat and the Assemblée Nationale. Contrary to senators, deputies of the National Assembly are elected by universal direct suffrage, explaining our focus on this chamber.

Data and measurement

To study the relationship between political competition and political selection, we constructed a dataset which contains detailed individual information about all the members of the French National Assembly from its first effective working year in 1959 to the end of the XIIIth legislature in 2012 at a yearly rate. We keep only deputies who stayed in office the whole legislature (more than 2,400), for a total of over 24,000 observations. We first discuss our measure of activity, before we

Regression results

The regression models considered use our measure of activity (which is discussed in detail in Section 4.1) as the endogenous variable, and are estimated with OLS with errors clustered at the deputy and region level.19 Table 4 displays the regression results.

In a first model, as shown in column 1, we

Conclusion

Since politicians may differ in their quality, one needs to identify the drivers of an efficient selection mechanism. This paper investigated the relationship between electoral competition and political selection. For this purpose we constructed an original dataset encompassing detailed information about more than 2,400 deputies of the French Assemblée Nationale from 1958 to 2012, including their individual work within the Parliament as well as personal characteristics on a yearly basis.

Our

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous editors, Elise Brezis, Laurens Cherchye, Bram De Rock, Fabio Padovano, two anonymous referees and participants at the seminar at the University of Leuven in Kortrijk, at the European Public Choice Society meeting 2015 and at the annual meeting of the French Economic Association 2015 for their insightful comments and suggestions. We also thank Dominique Anglès d′Auriac from the Archive department of the Assemblée Nationale. The usual caveats apply.

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