Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/318153 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
BCAM Working Paper No. 1802
Publisher: 
Birkbeck, University of London, Birkbeck Centre for Applied Macroeconomics (BCAM), London
Abstract: 
We study the effect of the electoral system on the quality of politicians, measured by the average educational attainment, at the local level in Italy over the period 1994-2017. Since 1993, municipalities below 15,000 inhabitants vote with a single-ballot system, whereas cities above 15,000 inhabitants threshold are subject to a double ballot.Exploiting the discontinuous policy change nearby the population cut-off we have implemented a RDD and found that runoff elections lead to a decrease in the educational attainment of local politicians by about 2% compared to years of schooling of politicians in municipalities voting with a single-ballot scheme.We speculate that the negative effect is driven by the different selection process of candidates adopted by political parties between runoff and single-ballot system. Findings are similar when we use alternative measures of quality of politicians related both to the previous occupation and to previous political experience, and when we control for different measures of political closeness.
JEL: 
C31
D72
I20
J42
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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