Measuring the quality of politicians

Voters face significant informational limitations when evaluating candidates in competitive elections: beyond party affiliation and observable sociodemographic characteristics, they have limited access to reliable signals of politician quality. To address this gap, we develop a voter-centred framework for conceptualising and measuring politicians' quality. Our framework identifies the two dimensions of competence and effort as observable signals of the latent construct of politician quality. We then construct a comparative quality index for incumbent legislators and candidates across six countries.