Abstract
This paper studies the effect of candidates’ personal vote ranks on promotions to political power in an open list proportional representation system. Using a regression discontinuity design and data from Finnish local elections, we find that ranking first within a party enhances a politician’s chances of getting promoted to the position of a municipal board chair, the most important task in Finnish local politics. Other ranks matter less. We document that the effect of ranking first is larger when there is less within-party competition, but the role of external competition is ambiguous. Our evidence suggests that the mechanism behind the rank effects is primarily unrelated to electoral incentives but rather to party-specific norms or political culture. Ranks seem to be, however, only a complement to other promotion criteria such as politicians’ previous political experience or how close to the party lines their policy positions stand.
Highlights
How do political parties select the people who get promoted to leading political positions? The answer is not that obvious and political scientists have been referring to political promotions as the “black box” or “secret garden” of politics (Gallagher and Marsh 1988; FieldElectronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.London WC2A 2AE, UK 3 VATT Institute for Economic Research, Arkadiankatu 7, 00101 Helsinki, Finland1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Public Choice (2018) 177:87–109 and Siavelis 2008; Hazan and Rahat 2010)
This paper studies the extent to which political parties account for voter preferences in the within-party negotiations for political promotions to municipal board and municipal council chairman positions in Finnish local governments
Understanding the links between election outcomes and political promotions is crucial in understanding accountability, how well voter preferences are reflected in actual policies, and how electoral institutions interact with the selection of political leaders when no official rules dictate who becomes a political leader
Summary
How do political parties select the people who get promoted to leading political positions? The answer is not that obvious and political scientists have been referring to political promotions as the “black box” or “secret garden” of politics This paper studies the extent to which political parties account for voter preferences in the within-party negotiations for political promotions to municipal board and municipal council chairman positions in Finnish local governments.. It is interesting to compare both causal (Folke et al 2016) and descriptive (Dal Bó et al 2017) evidence on political promotions in Sweden to our results from Finland, as those countries are otherwise very similar, but differ in electoral systems, with Sweden having a semi-open and Finland a pure open list system.. Our descriptive analysis suggests that parties may especially take the candidates’ policy positions and their previous political experience into account in their promotion decisions The latter finding is consistent with the interviews, the interviewees did not mention policy positions as important determinants of promotions
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