Upcoming Session
Monday, May 18, 2026
17:30h
Presented by
Sophie Suda (University of Basel)
https://sophiesuda.github.io/

Measuring the quality of politicians

Abstract

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.

About this workshop

The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.

The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.

Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.

If you would like to present, attend, or have any question about seminar, please contact Vladimir Avetian (vladimir.avetian@dauphine.psl.eu) or Edgar Jimenez Bedolla (edgar.jimenez-bedolla@dauphine.psl.eu)

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