Rank effects in political promotions

How do political parties select the people who get promoted to leading political positions? The answer is not that obvious and political scientists have been referring to political promotions as the “black box” or “secret garden” of politics (Gallagher and Marsh 1988; Field and Siavelis 2008; Hazan and Rahat 2010). Promotions to cabinet or party leadership positions, for example, frequently are considered to be internal matters, and parties may even be reluctant to reveal any details to outsiders.

Many countries around the world use electoral systems with open or semi-open lists in which a voter can or must express her preference for a particular politician amongst the many candidates fielded by a party. Therefore, the outcomes of such elections necessarily reflect voter preferences for individual candidates. This paper studies the extent to which political parties account for voter preferences in the within-party negotiations for political promotions to municipal board and municipal council chairman positions in Finnish local governments.¹ We analyze the causal effect of intra-party vote ranks on political promotions, and also describe those promotions more broadly. Understanding the links between election outcomes and political promotions is crucial in understanding accountability, how well voter preferences are reflected in actual policies, and how electoral institutions interact with the selection of political leaders when no official rules dictate who becomes a political leader.

Our paper provides several extensions to the literature on rank effects in politics (Crisp et al. 2013; Anagol and Fujiwara 2016; Folke et al. 2016; André et al. 2017). We also contribute to the literature on political selection and the design of electoral systems more generally. First, it is interesting to compare both causal (Folke et al. 2016) and descriptive (Dal Bó et al. 2017) evidence on political promotions in Sweden to our results from Finland, as those countries are otherwise very similar, but differ in electoral systems, with Sweden having a semi-open and Finland a pure open list system.² While the effects of various electoral systems on political behavior have interested political scientists for a long time (Duverger 1954; Grofman and Lijphart 1986; Sartori 1994), comparative evidence on the determinants of political promotions is scarce.

We show that the primary effect—i.e., the effect of ranking first in preferential votes on the likelihood of political promotions (Folke et al. 2016)—is not present in municipalities that are governed by single-party majorities. In other municipalities, (intra-party) election winners are around 20% more likely to be promoted to the position of municipal board chairman, which is the most important position in Finnish local politics.³ It is interesting to observe that parties take individual candidates’ vote ranks (rather than vote shares) into account in political promotions. Because our causal findings are based on a regression discontinuity design comparing close winners and close runners-up (Lee and Lemieux 2010), the results imply that in many cases an arbitrary distinction between the candidates may be decisive.

Second, we document three additional novel findings. The effect of ranking first appears to be limited by and large to the highest position of board chairman, as we do not find a statistically significant primary effect on promotions to council chairman, the second-most important position in Finnish local politics. Furthermore, we do not find any statistically significant evidence that the parties nominating both board and council chairs would promote second-ranking candidates to council chairs more often than third-ranking candidates. However, the estimates appear to be positive, economically significant and robust in magnitude across different specifications. Moreover, we find some weak evidence of lower ranks mattering for promotions to council chairmanship.

Third, besides the rank and leadership positions in question, the former may depend on other factors. We find that the primary effect is smaller when internal party competition is stronger. The results regarding the role of external competition are mixed, although most of the evidence supports the argument that the rank effects are larger when the competition between parties is weaker. We also argue that differences in candidate and leadership selection across the political spectrum might influence the primary effect (Duverger 1954; Janda and King 1985; Lisi et al. 2015). Accordingly, we find evidence of rank effects for the rightwing parties, but not for the leftwing parties. This result is supported by evidence from interviews with Finnish party officials. Therefore, party-specific democratic or cultural norms may explain the presence of such effects.

While we do find evidence of the rank effects, the big picture is that ranks seem to have roles complementary to other factors, as the effects are present only in some subsamples. Our descriptive analysis suggests that parties may especially take the candidates’ policy positions and their previous political experience into account in their promotion decisions. The latter finding is consistent with the interviews, although the interviewees did not mention policy positions as important determinants of promotions.

Our study is related to several other research efforts. First, rank-based norms or decision rules have been analyzed in various contexts. Some examples documenting such phenomena include Pope (2009), who shows that hospitals that improve their ranking attract more patients in the future, and Hartzmark (2015), who studies rank effects in investors’ asset trading behavior.

Second, research has shown that rank-based behavior likewise is present in the political arena. Anagol and Fujiwara (2016) exploit regression discontinuity designs in Brazilian, Indian and Canadian first-past-the-post elections, documenting that second-place candidates are substantially more likely than close third-place candidates to win in subsequent elections. More closely related to our work on how parties make decisions are recent studies by Crisp et al. (2013) and André et al. (2017), who report correlational evidence from Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, indicating that in the case of semi-open lists, parties reward vote-earning candidates with better future pre-election list positions. Most importantly, Folke et al. (2016) show a causal link between winning the preferential vote and becoming a party leader in Swedish municipalities with semi-open list systems. They label this effect the “primary effect” with the idea that local elections serve the role of primary elections in subsequent intra-party negotiations.

Third, the principles governing intra-party decisions on political promotions and nominations also have been the subject of qualitative research. Of particular interest is the Political Party Database Project, a recent major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies (Poguntke et al. 2016). However, the project focuses on national parties and politics and, thus, does not shed light on how local parties behave.

Fourth, our paper also aims to deepen the understanding of how political parties with different ideologies vary in terms of the selection rules they use. Such differences can be found in the form of, for example, gender quotas for candidates (Caul 2001), or different appointment and voting systems (Rahat and Hazan 2001). Among earlier works, Duverger (1954) and Janda and King (1985), for instance, have argued that leftwing parties are more likely to adopt centralized candidate selection processes than right-wing parties are, although the origins of such differences are not entirely clear. However, some scholars, such as Shomer (2014), find weak or no support for party differences in candidate selection procedures. Lisi et al. (2015) use cross-country data over more than half a century to show that parties with different ideologies differ in terms of leadership selection methods across the world. For instance, leftwing parties more often make their leadership choices within party organs than center and rightwing parties do, while center and rightwing parties give the power to voters, party members and conference delegates.

Finally, and more broadly speaking, our results contribute to the literature on political selection (Besley 2005), in particular, how election systems influence political selection (Carey and Shugart 1995; Beath et al. 2016; Braendle 2016) and what personal characteristics are associated with political selection into various offices (Dal Bó et al. 2017).

Political parties across the world use different types of rules when they are deciding whom to promote to political power (Poguntke et al. 2016). While Finnish political parties have no official rules dictating who must be promoted, interviews we conducted with party officials suggest that electoral performance is one of the factors that many of the parties consider when determining political promotions. From prior literature (see Sect. 2), we know that decision-makers may base their decisions on rank-based norms or informal rules in various contexts. Why is that the case? We can summarize in the following four points the literature’s central arguments.

First, if votes (or vote ranks) matter when parties decide about nominations and promotions, politicians might have stronger incentives to put more effort into their individual campaigns. Such additional effort undoubtedly is desirable from the parties’ perspective. Responsiveness to preferences also could be desired by voters (Hopkin 2001; Maravall 2008), not least because they care about policies for which leader identity could be an important determinant (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Jones and Olken 2005). In the Finnish municipalities, a decisive case in which being chairman matters for policy is a tied vote. The chairman’s vote then breaks the tie (both in the board and the council). Moreover, the chairmen of municipal boards and councils often are involved in hiring new public officials. Public officials are considered to have notable power in Finnish municipalities (KAKS 2008). The chairmen can act as political leaders who exploit their high positions to achieve partisan goals. They also can act as democratic leaders who try to promote common goals that have been agreed upon by the majority. In both cases, chairmen could have a considerable impact on policy outcomes.

Second, we can draw an analogy to primary elections in which party members or voters choose the party’s candidate. If voters prefer more transparent nomination procedures (Harmel and Janda 1994; Carey and Polga-Hecimovich 2006), the party might be able to attract more votes if those votes matter beyond the immediate election result. Some voter demand for transparent nomination procedures clearly exists in Finnish local politics. For instance, a survey conducted by Kunnallisalan Kehittämissäätiö found that around two out of three voters said that parties should declare their candidates for important political positions (KAKS 2008). Furthermore, local newspapers usually write about an election’s winners and speculate about nominations. Voters tend to be dissatisfied if the most popular politicians are not given any important positions, which also can be seen in the media. Such voter dissatisfaction might pressure local party groups to give their most popular candidates important positions in the local government.

Third, if any decision rule exists, votes (or vote ranks) would be a simple and objective basis for selection when promotions and nominations are in question.

Fourth, a promotion rule based on vote ranks might be related to internal organization of parties or the party culture. For instance, parties might adopt such a promotion rule to eliminate middle-rank activists or internal conflicts within the party to achieve stronger cohesion (Katz and Mair 1995). Hortala-Vallve and Mueller (2015) theorize that parties introduce primaries when party heterogeneity is too great and parties are in danger of splitting into smaller political groups.

Based on the foregoing arguments, we formulate our main hypothesis as follows:

According to Finnish party officials, vote ranks are not the only factor in political promotions. The parties often also base their decisions on candidates’ prior political experience and other competencies. Thus, it is plausible not to expect a one-to-one relationship between ranking first, for instance, and being promoted to positions with more political power. We provide descriptive analysis on other determinants of political promotions in Sect. 5.

One party holds more than half of the seats in roughly every third local council. The selection of political leaders may work differently in municipalities governed by single-party majorities or coalitions. When the largest party has control of over half of the seats, it nominates the board chairman almost without exception (see Table A1 in Online Appendix A). It is possible that inter-party bargaining affects not only which party gets to nominate the leading politicians, but also who these political leaders should be.⁴ Inter-party bargaining and competition may make party behavior more efficient, which potentially means that voters’ views are more likely to be internalized in leadership nominations (Folke et al. 2016; Galasso and Nannicini 2011b; De Paola and Scoppa 2011). Thus, we formulate the following hypothesis regarding the difference between municipalities with and without absolute majorities and political competition in general:

However, the degree of political competition also may have an opposite effect. Hirano and Snyder (2014) argue that primary elections were introduced in the United States to promote individual electoral competition within dominant parties in localities where external political competition is weak.

Previous research (see Sect. 2) has documented potential differences in candidate selection methods across the political spectrum and, thus, that channel ought not to be neglected when analyzing rank effects. If any ideological differences exist, they may extend to leadership selection. For example, parties may differ in their democratic norms and ideologies or cultures and consequently may adopt different nomination procedures irrespective of how they will be reflected in electoral success. If rightwing parties prefer more inclusive nomination procedures—as found elsewhere (Lisi et al. 2015) as well as in the case of local Finnish politics—then we should expect to find a larger primary effect for them than for leftwing parties. The last hypothesis we postulate and test in this paper is as follows:

We interviewed representatives of the eight largest Finnish parties to obtain better understanding of potential partisan differences in political promotion patterns. Those discussions suggest that the differences could indeed arise from different party cultures. For instance, the largest leftwing party is explicit in saying that voters cannot affect promotion choices, whereas other parties say that votes or even vote ranks matter.

This paper combines municipal election data from the Finnish Ministry of Justice and information on various politicians’ local government positions collected by the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities (Kuntaliitto 2013). These data are available for four elections between 2000 and 2012 and the respective electoral terms. The data are further merged with data on municipal employee status from KEVA, income data from the Finnish Tax Administration and socioeconomic characteristics from Statistics Finland.

Three further aspects of the data should be mentioned. First, we omit two municipalities in 2004, as mistakes are evident in their election results. Second, the chairmen are observed at the beginning of each electoral term and some unobserved changes are possible during their 4-year terms in office. For example, parties could agree that a chairman’s term is shorter than 4 years and that another person will take his place at some point. Third, chairmen of the municipal boards need not be elected politicians.⁸ We identify 42 such board chairmen in our sample. As they did not participate in elections, we cannot include them in our empirical analysis.

In the main parts of our empirical analysis of rank effects, we enter data only for candidates who rank nth and (n + 1)th. In a few cases, two (or more) candidates tie in votes and have the same vote rank. We drop such party lists from the sample. We concentrate on the party lists that get to nominate the chairman because the other cases exhibit no variation of interest in the outcome variable. We are interested only in the within-party decisions on who to promote rather than on the between-party allocations of chair positions; thus, the population parameter of interest refers only to the lists that get the chair position.

Table B1 in Online Appendix B provides descriptive comparisons between the winners and runners-up, i.e., the sample used in our main empirical analysis. We notice immediately that the most popular candidates are more likely to obtain important positions in local government than runners-up, but at the same time, they differ along many other dimensions as well. For example, they are more successful in the elections as measured by numbers of votes and vote shares and also more likely to be incumbents, have university educations, have larger earnings and higher socioeconomic status. Such differences indicate that winners could be more competent than runners-up and, hence, more likely to get promoted to top positions for reasons other than their ranks or electoral performances more generally. It is, therefore, likely that they will differ also in many relevant unobservable characteristics, thus calling for a valid research design if we are interested in the causal effect of rank on political promotions.

How do political leaders look compared to other politicians? We turn to that question in Table 2. We show means of various characteristics for four different groups: board chairmen, party list winners, all elected candidates and all candidates. To facilitate the comparison, the latter three groups exclude the board chairs and include only the party lists that got to nominate the board chairman. Note, especially, that the comparison between board chairman and first-ranking politicians provides us with an interesting window for comparing voters’ and parties’ preferences for politicians.

Several interesting observations arise from those analyses. First, and important for our study, vote rank appears to be (positively) related to becoming a board chairman. That is, however, far from the only dimension along which board chairmen differ. Second, another crucial distinction is that board chairmen are on average more experienced, based on incumbency status, previous leadership experience and age, than candidates in any other group. Third, the chairmen earn more, are less often unemployed and have higher educational attainment than other elected or all candidates. Those comparisons suggest some positive selection into power based on their level of competence to the extent these metrics indicate competence. However, they are less competent than the most popular candidates. Fourth, the share of women among the chairs is much lower than among the election winners, hinting at some possible gender bias in promotions.⁹ Finally, the Finnish parties nominate reliable party leaders whose policy preferences are closer to party averages than those of the other elected politicians, all candidates or the list winners.¹⁰ These findings are broadly in line with the theoretical arguments of, for example, Crisp et al. (2013) and Tavits (2009)—candidates who accumulate many personal votes are often party outsiders who may disrupt party unity, that is, parties face tradeoffs between popularity and policy cohesion. Bäck et al. (2016) also report related findings. In particular, they show that cabinet ministers are appointed with the aim of minimizing policy distance to the most important political actors.

The findings from the simple mean comparisons largely are corroborated by regression results reported in Online Appendix Tables B2–B4, where we regress a dummy variable for board or council chairmanships on rank dummies and a set of other covariates. Consistent with the idea of vote ranks mattering for political promotions, a higher rank and more votes increase politicians’ likelihood of being promoted. Based on that analysis, we would reach conclusions similar to Crisp et al. (2013) and André et al. (2017), namely that all the top ranks matter for political promotions, even after controlling for a rich set of observable characteristics.

To summarize, it seems that parties prefer experience and cohesiveness more than voters, whereas voters have slightly stronger preferences for other metrics, especially competence. Nonetheless, our findings hint that Finnish parties do fairly well in promoting more competent politicians to important positions in the local government. The findings also align with the interviews we conducted with Finnish party officials, according to whom promotion decisions are based mainly on three factors: electoral performance, political experience and other competencies.

More broadly, our descriptive analysis relates to a recent paper by Dal Bó et al. (2017), who study how Swedish local politicians, including political leaders, compare to the populations they represent. They find that local Swedish politicians are on average significantly smarter and are better leaders than the people they represent, measured by test scores on military cognitive and leadership tests. Similarly, leading politicians appear to be more competent than other politicians. The main difference between Finland and Sweden is that in the former voters have more say on who gets elected, while in the latter parties’ role is more pronounced. Despite these differences, both political systems seem to be able to select elected politician and party leaders who are competent. That conclusion is one indication that semi-open and open lists can be fairly similar in their selection of party leaders.

Simply regressing the outcome, becoming the chairman of a municipal board, on a candidate’s vote rank within his party list tells us only something about the correlation between those variables. One central concern is the omission of politicians’ characteristics that bias the estimates to an unknown degree and direction. For instance, more able politicians might attract more votes and rank high in election results, but they also could be more likely to receive top positions because of their skills. Such characteristics might be observable to the voter, but not to the econometrician. In order to overcome endogeneity issues in estimating the impact of vote rank on political promotions, we will adopt a regression discontinuity design (RDD) approach.

In the regression discontinuity design (RDD), we compare two candidates with different vote ranks but (almost) the same number of votes, who also are likely to be similar in their characteristics, by estimating regression functions of the formwhere Y_it is the outcome of interest, v_it is the forcing variable measuring the distance from the threshold between two ranks, 1{v_it> 0} is an indicator for ranking first and β is the coefficient of interest. If f(v_it) is approximately correctly specified within a given bandwidth, and no precise manipulation of the forcing variable is observed (i.e., the density is smooth at the threshold), the covariates should evolve smoothly at the boundary and, thus, \(\hat{\beta }\) will be the causal estimate of the primary effect.

As advised in recent work (Gelman and Imbens 2017), we will execute the design using low-order local polynomial specifications. Our implementation closely follows Hyytinen et al. (2017), who evaluate different implementations of regression discontinuity designs in a close election setting by comparing RDD results with the results from actual randomizations that happen when two (or more) candidates tie for the last seat in Finnish local elections. More specifically, we use local linear and quadratic polynomials estimated separately on both sides of the cutoff. In our benchmark specifications, we employ MSE-optimal bandwidths, but we also verify robustness to alternative bandwidths.¹¹ Finally, we also estimate RDD with bias correction and robust inference, as suggested by Calonico et al. (2014). We fix the main and bias bandwidths to be the same following Calonico et al. (2018), who argue that that is an optimal choice. All local regressions use a triangular kernel.

We use the relative vote margin as the forcing variable. For the primary effect regressions, for instance, this is defined as the vote distance of winner (runner-up) from runner-up (winner) divided by the total number of their votes. Doing so means that the threshold between two ranks is set at zero.

Finally, it is not obvious that we will be able to capture any rank effects using RDD that identify a local effect at the threshold where both candidates are equally popular. Employing such an empirical strategy necessarily implies that we can identify only the direct and independent effect of vote ranks. The rank effect estimated in that way, if present, requires that rank has relevance up to and above the vote count. Some theories discussed in Sect. 2 do not make a clear distinction between votes and vote ranks. Vote ranks could be more important, for example, if they are more salient indicators of success in elections or voters attach some special value to winning. Previous research has argued that political parties in party-centered environments have incentives to place popular persons high on their electoral lists to maximize their electoral performances (Shugart et al. 2005). Folke et al. (2016) argue that the same logic also should hold for promotions to top positions. Unfortunately, the RDD setting does not allow studying the role of popularity per se. Future work should aim to find alternative strategies for evaluating that aspect.

This paper explores vote ranks as a determinant of political promotions. While the effects of various electoral systems have long attracted the interest of political scientists (Duverger 1954; Grofman and Lijphart 1986; Sartori 1994), the idea of interaction between the distribution of votes and political appointments recently advocated by Folke et al. (2016) is rather new. We find evidence of the primary effect—i.e., the effect of ranking first in preferential votes within a party—in promotions to chairman of local Finnish municipal boards and some weaker evidence of lower ranks mattering for promotions to the post of council chairman. Moreover, we show that the primary effect differs in the degree of political competition and ideologies of parties.

Because the vote rank is accounted for in the political promotions in only some subsamples, rank is at best complementary to other considerations that parties have in selecting leaders. Our descriptive analysis suggests that politicians’ previous political experience and policy positions may play an important role in political promotions.

Our theoretical arguments are general. Thus, they may apply in other electoral contexts or other types of political promotion. It also is plausible that similar empirical patterns could emerge elsewhere. Many countries around the world, such as Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Spain and Sweden, use open or semi-open lists in at least some of their elections. Furthermore, in many of those countries, local political leaders such as mayors are not elected, but rather appointed from the pool of local councilors. Preferential votes likewise might matter at other levels of government. For instance, the candidates who obtain the most votes in Finnish parliamentary elections—“vote rakes” (ääniharava), as they are called in Finnish—often are front-runners when it comes to distributing cabinet positions. Descriptive evidence from a variety of countries (Crisp et al. 2013; André et al. 2017) suggests that much like Finland, the political parties in political systems with preferential voting often choose their vote pullers for political promotion. To what extent such procedures reflect vote ranks and not some other characteristics correlated with electoral success is an empirical question that should be explored further in future research.

The results of this paper arguably are important from the voters’ perspective, as it appears that, under certain circumstances, their votes matter beyond the direct electoral outcomes of their choice on Election Day. Moreover, leading politicians’ competencies and qualifications may matter for actual policy outcomes or economic performance (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Jones and Olken 2005). While evaluating the link between selection of political leaders and policy outcomes is beyond the scope of this paper, it nonetheless is important to understand how leaders are chosen when no explicit rules governing the selection process are in place.