The gatekeeper’s dilemma: Political selection or team effort
研究了政党在选举中如何平衡激励候选人投入竞选与确保自己偏好的候选人当选之间的权衡，发现受欢迎的大政党更容易利用优势保护特定候选人，并在选后谈判中获得更有利结果。
Political parties play a crucial gatekeeping role in elections, including controlling electoral resources, candidate recruitment, and electoral list compositions. In making these strategic choices, parties aim to encourage candidates to invest in the campaign, while also trying to secure advantages for their preferred candidates. We study how parties navigate this trade-off using a specific feature of the Norwegian local electoral system in which parties can give advantaged positions to some candidates in an otherwise open list. Our theory reveals that parties’ ex-ante electoral strength impacts their strategic decisions. Notably, the trade-off is weaker for more popular parties, allowing them to facilitate the election of their preferred candidates without compromising the party’s overall performance. We show empirically that the moral hazard concern is real, and that larger parties are indeed more likely to use their power to make some candidates safe. The advantage of large parties extends further: safeguarding specific candidates enables parties to achieve disproportionately favorable outcomes in post-electoral bargaining. These findings reveal new insights for political representations, policy outcomes, and intra-party dynamics more broadly.