Must Voters Choose Between Political Competence and Descriptive Representation?

• In Event: Does a Candidate's Social Class Matter?

Abstract

Do democracies face a trade-off between descriptive representation and competent leadership? We use a rich dataset covering the entire Danish population, including the universe of Danish candidates for local and national elections over from 1990 to 2013 period to explore selection of political candidates. Specifically, we ask four questions to provide a conceptual replication of previous work in a different context: (i) Are politicians more competent than the general population? (ii) Does such selection reflect social background or selection on individual skills? (iii) Do politicians have social backgrounds that are descriptively representative of the population? (iv) Is there a trade-off between selection on competence and social representation? Following the conceptual replication, we utilize a grand municipality merger, which significantly reduced the number of municipalities and test if an increased political competition affected the social representation and the trade-off between competition and representation.

Authors

• Jens Olav Dahlgaard, Copenhagen Business School

• Rasmus T Pedersen, The Danish Center for Social Science Research

• Lene Holm Pedersen, University of Copenhagen