Candidate Entry Into Local Government

Abstract

We explore the governance challenge of how to get high human capital, high integrity, representative citizens to put themselves forward for consideration as political candidates. To do so, we evaluate an intervention that was designed to tackle this challenge in collaboration with partners in government and civil society, which was implemented in the lead up to the June 24th, 2023, Local Council Elections in Sierra Leone. The intervention : i) identified, screened, and encouraged high quality potential candidates to enter politics; and ii) shared information about these aspirants with political parties. Field teams identified potential candidates via a combination of structured community nominations and screening on technocratic merit. The initiative was randomly assigned across two levels: first, across 150 of 300 rural local government wards (the most local administrative unit); and second, with varied saturation across the 92 host constituencies (the second higher administrative unit) that contain these wards to account for potential spillover effects. Key outcomes of interest concern the number and quality of people in the pool of aspirants, selected candidates, and elected officials. We use detailed information on almost the universe of aspirants to local office in our sample to describe the barriers to quality representation at multiple stages of the path to local office.