Why do voters elect less qualified candidates?
| Author | Nobuhiro Mizuno,Ryosuke Okazawa |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221103143 |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Why do voters elect less
qualified candidates?
Nobuhiro Mizuno
Faculty of Economics, Osaka University of Economics
Ryosuke Okazawa
Graduate School of Economics, Osaka Metropolitan University
Abstract
Voters sometimes vote for seemingly less-qualified candidates. To explain this fact, we develop a
political agency model with sequential elections in which a voter elects a politician among candi-
dates with different competence (valence) levels, considering that politicians’representation of
voters’preferences depends on their competence levels. We show that a negative relationship
exists between politicians’competence and their representation when a future challenger is likely
to be incompetent and the reward for politicians is small. We also highlight voters’private infor-
mation on how they evaluate candidates’competence, demonstrating that voters’demand for
incompetent candidates can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Keywords
Candidates’competence, political agency, repeated elections, private information, signaling
1. Introduction
Candidates regarded as less competent by voters sometimes win elections. For example, a
survey by Di Tella and Rotemberg (2018) shows that in the 2016 United States presiden-
tial election, citizens elected Donald Trump, knowing that he did not understand policy as
well as Hillary Clinton. In the pre-election survey, only 12% of participants agreed that
Trump understands policy more than Clinton, while 65% of participants agreed that
Clinton understands policy more than Trump.
Corresponding author:
Nobuhiro Mizuno, Faculty of Economics, Osaka University of Economics, Osaka 533-8533, Japan.
Email: n-mizuno@osaka-ue.ac.jp
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2022, Vol. 34(3) 443–477
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09516298221103143
journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp
Existing theories explain why incompetent individuals can hold political offices in a
democracy, but their explanations focus on the entry of individuals into politics
(Caselli and Morelli, 2004; Messner and Polborn, 2004; Mattozzi and Merlo, 2015;
Besley et al., 2017).
1
Although the entry side of political selection is important, the exam-
ples described above illustrate that voters do not always elect the most competent candi-
date, indicating that the quality of an elected official may be low even when high-quality
individuals are incentivized to run for office.
This paper aims to theoretically explain voters’demand for incompetent candidates,
focusing on the relationship between politicians’competence and their representation
of voters’preferences.
2
To this end, we extend a two-period political agency model, a
la Besley (2006), incorporating the following key structures: (i) politicians differ in
observable competence levels, in addition to unobservable policy preferences; (ii) an
open seat election is introduced before the first policy choice to analyze voters’
choices of the policymaker’s competence level, and (iii) voters, who are identical and
are treated as a single player, have private information about how much weight they
give to the politicians’competence.
3
Specifically, a competent and an incompetent can-
didate contest the first election. After choosing a first-period policy, the incumbent, the
winner of the first election, contests a new challenger, and the winner of the second elec-
tion chooses a second-period policy. The voters’payoffs depend on the competence
levels of elected politicians and selected policies. As in Besley (2006), because voters
cannot observe politicians’policy preferences, politicians’policy concessions to voters
can signal shared preferences, increasing their probability of re-election.
Our first main finding is that politicians’competence relates negatively to their
representation of voters’interests when the future challenger is likely to be incompetent.
This negative relationship emerges because voters cannot commit to future re-election
strategies. For example, when the incumbent is less competent than the challenger,
voters may elect the challenger, even though the incumbent has chosen voters’preferred
policy. Similarly, when the incumbent is more competent than the challenger, voters may
re-elect the incumbent even though the incumbent has not chosen the voters’preferred
policy. As a result, when future challengers are more likely to be incompetent, incompe-
tent incumbents have greater incentives to act in the voters’interest, while competent
incumbents have fewer incentives to do so.
4
This negative relationship between compe-
tence and representation is also likely to hold when the rewards for politicians are small.
When the reward is large enough, politicians in office choose voters’preferred policy to
be re-elected regardless of their competence levels, which eliminates the difference in
representation between competent and incompetent politicians. Due to this negative rela-
tionship between competence and representation, voters can elect the incompetent candi-
date in the open seat election during the first period, if they place enough weight on
candidates’representation. One novel aspect of this result is that voters can elect incom-
petent candidates even though the candidates are identical with the exception of compe-
tence levels from the voters’perspective.
Our second finding is that when politicians are uncertain about voters’preferences, the
model exhibits multiple equilibria, and voters’distrust in competent politicians can be a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Specifically, we consider a situation where one type of voter
(type-C) gives the highest priority to the candidates’competence and always votes for
444 Journal of Theoretical Politics 34(3)
a candidate with the highest competence level, while the other type (type-P) places a
lower priority on competence and weighs the candidates’competence against their
expected policy choices when deciding whom to vote for. To explain this self-fulfilling
prophecy, assume that voters suspect the representation of competent politicians for some
reason and vote for the competent candidate in the first election only if they are
type-C. Then, the winning candidate can identify the voters’type from the electoral
result; after winning, the competent candidate perceives that the voters are type-C who
place the maximum value on the candidates’competence. As a result, the negative rela-
tionship between competence and representation emerges. The competent candidate will
pursue their own interests in the policy choice stage, sacrificing voters’interests, based on
the perception that their high level of competence will play in their favour in the next elec-
tion. Then, the assumed voters’distrust of competent politicians becomes self-fulfilling,
and voters’distrust becomes ex-post rational.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The next section briefly reviews the
existing literature. Section 3. describes the baseline model, in which the voters’prefer-
ences are common knowledge. We analyze this model and derive the first main
finding in Section 4. Section 5. incorporates the voters’private information into the
model and derives the second main finding. Section 6. discusses the empirical predictions
of the model. Finally, Section 7. concludes the paper.
2. Related literature
Some studies have analyzed why and when voters demand incompetent politicians (Di Tella
and Rotemberg, 2018; Eguia and Giovannoni, 2019; Mattozzi and Snowberg, 2018;
Kishishita, 2020; Buisseret and Van Weelden, 2020); Morelli et al. 2021).
5
However,
most previous studies assume that competent candidates have intrinsic differences from
incompetent candidates beyond competence. Our study indicates that - even when all
things are equal - voters prefer a less competent candidate in an election.
In this sense, our study is closer to the theoretical literature that demonstrates why can-
didates’incompetence in itself may be beneficial to voters, by demonstrating that politi-
cians’competence can lower their accountability (Buisseret and Prato, 2016; Padró i
Miquel and Snowberg, 2012; Schnakenberg, 2021).
6
While the argument of Buisseret
and Prato (2016), who focus on politicians’factional activities in legislatures, is quite dif-
ferent from ours, the argument developed by Padró i Miquel and Snowberg (2012) and
Schnakenberg (2021) is close to our first main finding. Schnakenberg (2021) shows
that candidates with good traits are less accountable as voters cannot commit to replacing
the incumbent with good traits even after they observe poor policy performance.
However, in his model, the candidates’observable traits are signals of unobservable
policy preferences, and voters’payoffs do not include valence. In contrast, in our
model, the competence of elected politicians directly affects voters’payoffs, and candi-
dates’competence is conceptualized as independent of their policy preferences.
Consequently, in our model, whether voters’demand for incompetent politicians
emerges depends on (i) the probability of the future challenger being competent and
(ii) the degree to which voters emphasize politicians’policy choice, relative to their com-
petence. Padró i Miquel and Snowberg (2012) also analyze the relationship between
Mizuno and Okazawa 445
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