Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden
研究政党领袖如何权衡选举成功与自身生存来选择候选人能力，发现瑞典社会民主党1993年实施的性别交替配额提高了男性政治家的能力，因为平庸男性领袖被迫辞职。
We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in Swedish data. We use a novel approach, based on register data for the earnings of the whole population, to measure the competence of all politicians in 7 parties, 290 municipalities, and 10 elections (for the period 1982–2014). We ask how competence was affected by a zipper quota, requiring local parties to alternate men and women on the ballot, implemented by the Social Democratic Party in 1993. Far from being at odds with meritocracy, this quota raised the competence of male politicians where it raised female representation the most. We argue that resignation of mediocre male leaders was a key driver of this effect.