Party selectors, voters, and the choice of productive representatives under different types of list proportional representation

Thomas Däubler and Lukáš Linek

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Do party selectors or voters choose more productive politicians? Selectors may promote quality candidates and have an informational advantage over voters, but quality need not be the key criterion for nominations, and voters may be sufficiently informed to correct inferior decisions. We empirically examine whether the type of principal responsible for the selection affects individual parliamentary work (attendance, bills, amendments, questions, speeches). Flexible-list proportional representation systems are both interesting and analytically useful in this context, since seats within parties are first allocated to candidates reaching a certain number of personal votes, while any remaining seats are awarded based on the pre-electoral list rank. This allows us to compare three types of elected candidates: selector-chosen, voter-chosen, and doubly-chosen representatives. Analysing data from the Czech Republic in the period between 2002 and 2021, we find that voters have a stronger preference for candidates with high formal education than selectors. We do not find differences in parliamentary behaviour between selector-chosen and voter-chosen types. The results speak against a potential trade-off between giving voters more influence on within-party seat allocation and the quality of chosen representatives.

Keywords: list proportional representation; political selection; ballot structure; preference voting; candidate selection; flexible-list system; parliamentary behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/122594/1/MPRA_paper_122594.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:122594

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().