“Gender quotas and the crisis of the mediocre man”

“Our results indicate that gender quotas can challenge an established, and sometimes less competent, political class, forcing mediocre leaders out while increasing the number of competent politicians elected to office. Even though the study is confined to political organizations, these findings may hold true in other settings, including the private sector.

To establish these findings, we took advantage of a natural experiment in Sweden when the Social Democratic party voluntarily introduced a strict gender quota for its candidates in local elections in 1993. During internal discussions of the reform, the party’s women’s branch observed that some men were more critical of the quota than others. The quota became known as the “Crisis of the Mediocre Man,” since the least competent men had the most to fear from an influx of women into politics...

We define a competent politician as a person who makes more than the median income amongst politicians with similar characteristics. This competence measure is closely correlated with results from military enlistments tests of the intelligence and leadership capacity of those who serve in the armed forces. Our competence metric also correlates closely to other measures of political success and the quality of municipal service delivery.

Using our measure of competence, we find strong evidence of complacent political arrangements prior to the quota, with mediocre leaders selecting mediocre followers. We find significant improvements in the political competence of both leaders and followers after a quota is implemented...

The results in Figure 2 and 3 suggest that quotas work in part by shifting incentives in the composition of party ballots. Mediocre leaders resign (or are kicked out) in the wake of more gender parity. Because new leaders (on average) are more competent, they feel less threatened by selecting more able candidates, which starts a virtuous circle of higher competence.”

http://microeconomicinsights.org/gender-quotas-crisis-mediocre-man/

Kinda skeptical of the “competence measurement” here but too tired to look into it further right now...

FB: “quotas can actually increase the overall competence of politicians through the displacement of mediocre male candidates and leaders”