Katherine Casey, professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the faculty director of the King Center on Global Development, presented her team’s work in a CDDRL Research Seminar on Thursday, May 7. Casey opened her talk establishing that citizen esteem for politicians is on the decline. In the U.S., only 16 percent trust the federal government. Across 30 African countries, while 75 percent believe elections are the best way to choose leaders, only 37 percent are satisfied with how their democracies are working. Casey asserts that the root of this dissatisfaction runs deep, ultimately posing the question: how can high-human-capital, representative individuals be identified, screened, encouraged to run for office, and brought into consideration by political parties? 

Casey’s team examined local governance in Sierra Leone to answer this question, partnering with government and civil society to test an intervention designed to induce candidate entry. The field experiment was a nationwide, randomized controlled trial covering all fourteen local district councils in Sierra Leone. The team chose to focus on local councils because the barriers to entry are low, the work requires competence but is not particularly specialized, and its part-time nature allows candidates to run without quitting their day jobs. The experiment included two rounds of random assignment and implementation. 

The experiment focused on three headline factors: representation, quality, and gatekeeping. During the representation phase, the field team visited villages and spoke with residents to better understand who they would want to represent them. These nominees were then screened for quality using metrics for human capital, work experience, local experience, managerial capital, and conscientiousness. After this screening, candidates' profiles were sent to political parties. Of those nominated at the representation level, 85 percent were willing to share their profiles, and 89 percent said they were interested in running for office. 

When conducting analysis, Casey’s team found that top nominees from the representation stage score higher than both status quo applicants and incumbents on quality metrics, differences that are large in magnitude and highly statistically significant. Many top nominees came from traditional authority lineages, and many work in education, positioning them as alternative elites. Among lower-ranked nominees, only 16 percent ultimately entered electoral races, but this rate rose to 25 percent among top-ranked nominees.  Their entry enhanced the maximum observed quality of applicants in the potential candidate pool.

Analysis was then conducted to determine whether the parties selected any nominees from the profiles, which found that nearly all wards had at least one candidate selected and that nominations increased the likelihood that a local woman would make the candidate list.  Incumbents were highly favored in this election, leaving little space for new entrants to win elected seats.

Casey ended her talk with a few conclusions. Firstly, the intervention successfully identified popular, high-quality, new entrants to politics, drawn from a different set of elites. The nominees self-selected into the entry on quality, boasting the highest observed quality among applicants and selected candidates, which also showed that representation need not trade off quality. Casey’s team also found a challenge in translating willingness to run into formal applications, a challenge she believes could be honed in on with more recruitment efforts. Ultimately, the collaboration between research and policymakers crafted a unique model to empower dissatisfied voters to nominate leaders they want to see in office.