Better Politicians: If We Pay, Will They Come?

• Author: Dustin Rogers,Michael M. Atkinson,Sara Olfert
• Published date: 01 May 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12117
• Date: 01 May 2016

MICHAEL M. ATKINSON

DUSTIN ROGERS

SARA OLFERT

University of Saskatchewan

Better Politicians:

If We Pay, Will They Come?

While each election provides the Canadian House of Commons with a fresh

batch of politicians, no consideration has been given to the question of whether the qual-

ity of politicians is improving. Yet improving quality has been the focus of several

commissions urging increases in MP compensation. This article addresses the compe-

tence and compensation questions by asking whether changes in levels of compensation

might make a difference to the educational qualifications of political leaders. We assem-

ble a unique dataset of 1,291 federal politicians elected to the Canadian House of

Commons from 1993 to 2011 and show that prime ministers do have a preference for

more highly educated MPs when filling ministerial and other executive positions. Our

findings suggest that certain subgroups of MPs, particularly educated women, may be

attracted by upward shifts in compensation. We discuss the reasons for these effects and

the relative importance of compensation in career decisions.

Implicit in much of the work on political leadership is the idea that

leadership is an important variable in the production of good public pol-

icy and that removing obstacles to the recruitment of good leaders is a

worthy objective of political reformers. In sum, we would be well served

by competent leaders, and we should take measures to improve

leadership competence.

This article asks, f‌irst, whether competence is actually valued and,

second, whether higher levels of compensation are likely to attract stron-

ger, more competent politicians. In doing so, the article raises the

conceptual question of what constitutes competence and the methodo-

logical question of how to connect competence and compensation. The

latter connection may appear straightforward: increases in compensation

reduce opportunity costs for those with talent and induce them to con-

sider a life (or at least a period) in politics. Unfortunately, there is

nothing inevitable about this connection as researchers have begun to

discover (Messner and Polborn 2004). Compensation may attract better

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 2, May 2016 361

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12117

V

C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

politicians, but it may also encourage those with fewer alternatives, just

as it may discourage less able incumbents from surrendering a job that

has taken a lucrative turn.

Legislative research, much of it concentrated among US state legis-

latures, has been premised on the idea that better compensation is a

feature of legislative professionalization and that the supply of compe-

tent politicians depends on it (Squire 1988). Citizen-candidate models of

political representation (Besley and Coate 1997; Osborne and Slivinski

1996) also focus on the supply side of politics. In these models, any citi-

zen can offer herself as a candidate and will do so based on a cost-

benef‌it analysis that includes a consideration of the costs of running, the

likelihood of winning, and an estimate of who else might run (Poutvaara

and Takalo 2007). Voters choose candidates whose policy preferences

resemble their own and who are presumed to be capable of implement-

ing them. Thus the model turns on the supply of competent candidates

and the incentives that would induce them to enter political life. In the

language of rational choice, candidates “must solve a dynamic optimiza-

tion problem to determine the current decision that maximizes expected

present value of lifetime utility” (Diermeier, Keane, and Merlo 2005).

Compensation, in this setup, may be important, but there are a host of

other considerations for would-be candidates, including electability and

campaign costs.

In this article, we acknowledge the empirical work on US state

legislatures but depart from the citizen-candidate model to emphasize

the role of political party leaders in recruiting candidates. Parties make

no systematic appearance in citizen-candidate models, and yet in virtu-

ally all liberal democracies, particularly parliamentary ones, parties

organize governance from the selection of candidates to the selection of

the political executive. Where the citizen-candidate model emphasizes

the supply of politicians, a party-selection model concentrates on the

demand side. What do party leaders demand in candidates? Since

Downs (1957), we have modeled parties as power-seeking blocs and

treated electability as a criterion for evaluating policies and candidates.

In parliamentary systems, party leaders also value loyalty: as Mayhew

observed over 40 years ago, in the British parliament “party loyalty is

rewarded; heresy is not” (1974, 22).

If loyalty and electability requirements are met, is there any room

left to demand competence? In parliamentary systems, competence is

valued for governing purposes, rather than electoral ones, although

effective governing presumably enhances electoral prospects. Upon

election, prime ministers must f‌ill a number of executive positions and

can do so only from a very limited pool of candidates, namely the

362 Michael M. Atkinson, Dustin Rogers, and Sara Olfert