Candidate Selection

APSR — pp. 1-20 2026-04-24 Original Vetting for Virtue: Democracy’s Challenge in Excluding Criminals from Office

JOP 88/2 pp. 572-585 2026-04-01 Original Intraparty Competition, Geographic Responsiveness, and Incumbent Deselection in Closed-List Proportional Representation Jochen Rehmert Abstract Closed-list proportional representation is considered to produce politicians engaged in programmatic, party-oriented behavior. Personal vote-seeking and geographic responsiveness, however, are attributed to open-list or plurality systems. In this article, I argue that the focus on interparty competition masks incentives for geographic responsiveness generated by intraparty competition for nominations. Specifically, parties’ candidate selection methods that rely on locally minded delegates introduce incentives for incumbents to engage in localized responsiveness. Using survey experiments with party delegates in Germany and an original and novel dataset based on (historical) nomination protocols of the German Green party in combination with geo-referenced legislative behavior, I show that geographically responsive incumbents are preferred by delegates in survey experiments, rewarded with higher ranks and vote margins in the observational data, and that this is mainly limited to men who face greater competition. My findings shed new light on the interplay of electoral and selectoral incentives for behavior.

APSR — pp. 1-22 2026-03-23 Original Do Elites Know Best? Candidate Selection and Policy Implementation in Postindependence Tanzania JEREMY BOWLES Abstract How do candidate selection processes shape policy outcomes? Studying Tanzania’s initial single-party legislative elections, I assess how electing candidates preferred by party elites affected policy implementation, which emphasized rural development during this period. Leveraging the deterministic assignment of ballot symbols—which was orthogonal to candidate characteristics but had large electoral effects—finds that their election substantially increased the supply of salient local public goods. Assembling novel candidate-level data, I document that elites prioritized candidates’ national prominence while voters prioritized their local ties. Rather than representing misaligned incentives, the results are consistent with elites, in an incipient regime, more quickly understanding which characteristics would matter for candidates’ performance in office. Beyond highlighting novel conditions under which elite-led candidate selection facilitates responsiveness, the results underscore the distributive consequences of candidate selection even in nondemocratic settings.