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Do barriers to candidacy reduce political competition? Evidence from a bachelor’s degree requirement for legislators in Pakistan

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Abstract

In the 2002 election, candidates for Pakistan’s federal legislature had to possess at least a bachelor’s degree. This policy disqualified 60 out of the 207 incumbent legislators from running for election again. Using a difference-in-differences approach with panel data on all electoral constituencies in Pakistan, I find that this ballot access restriction does not affect political competition across all constituencies with disqualified incumbents equally. Stronger political competition is defined as a larger number of candidates contesting election, a smaller vote share and vote margin for the winning candidate, and a less concentrated candidate field, as measured by a Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) of vote shares. Competition declined significantly in constituencies where the disqualified incumbent belonged to a small party and where literacy levels were lower (signifying a smaller pool of substitute candidates). However, political competition increased in areas where the disqualified incumbent was stronger in terms of his winning vote margin.

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Notes

  1. Pakistan has a parliamentary system of government. Its political system is described in detail in the next section.

  2. In Pakistan, a bachelor’s has generally been a 14-year degree, even though both private and public colleges and universities have increasingly introduced 15- or 16-year degrees in order to make them compatible with foreign degrees.

  3. The 1997 National Assembly was suspended until 2002 without replacement when Musharraf took power in a coup in October 1999.

  4. Political competition and electoral competition will henceforth be treated as interchangeable terms.

  5. Voters must also meet minimum age and citizenship qualifications. In addition, certain requirements for voter registration, such as IDs, as well as the location of registration sites, may de facto disqualify many voters to whom these are not easily accessible. Besley et al. (2010) show that the reduction in voting restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests in the US South (through the Voting Rights Act of 1964) increased political competition.

  6. These numbers are for 2002, after the delimitation of constituencies in response to the population census of 1998. For the 1988–1997 elections, the National Assembly consisted of 207 general seats. I fully account for this redistricting, as explained in detail later.

  7. I do not study reserved seats in my analysis given that they are not based on direct election but on nominations.

  8. The executive order was abolished by a seven-member bench of the Supreme Court on April 21, 2008, following Musharraf’s fall from power, in response to a petition filed by two members of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam Fazl-ur-Rehman Group (JUI (F)) political party, on account of inconsistency with articles 17 (freedom of association) and 25 (equality of citizens) of the Constitution. In fact, previous drafts of this paper had been written before the law was struck down by the Supreme Court, and the statistic I cited (that this policy prevented 97 % of the population from contesting elections) was mentioned as a reason for the dissolution of the requirement.

    The February 2008 elections were held with the education requirement in place, therefore the legislators elected that year all possess bachelor’s degrees as well; only for those contesting by-elections did the law no longer hold. In the May 2013 election, the law no longer applied, and therefore the candidates and legislators elected this year are not required to have a bachelor’s degree. In the future, it would be useful to study the effect of going from a more educated Parliament elected in 2008 to one elected without this requirement in 2013.

  9. This is at least partly attributable to the anti-American stance of the MMA which resonated within the NWFP, the province which borders Afghanistan, in the wake of the US war there.

  10. However, more allegations surfaced after the 2008 elections, a number of which were later substantiated, showing that given more time, the acquisition of fake degrees turned out to be more of a problem.

  11. The results are available on request.

  12. All appendices are available online at this website: https://sites.google.com/site/madihaafzal/research/PublicChoiceAppendix.pdf?attredirects=0.

  13. The Election Commission does not have the maps in GIS formats required for this matching. Therefore, I obtained the maps in graphic formats from the Election Commission for 2002. For 1997, I got the maps from a private consulting company, ECIL, which had been hired as a consultant firm by the ECP. I then manually constructed the shape files for both the 1997 and the 2002 maps in GIS by first georeferencing the maps to have the same projection, and then digitizing the maps to have constituency boundaries (by drawing polygon lines through the maps). I used GIS to intersect the 1997 and 2002 boundaries, and then calculated the exact area weights of these intersected areas relative to the 1997 constituency and 2002 constituency to which they belonged. Details of the construction steps in GIS are available upon request.

  14. This constituency was an outlier in terms of candidates standing for election, but not in terms of other political competition outcomes. The winning candidate in that constituency had 29 % of the total votes polled and his winning margin as a proportion of the total votes was 11 %.

  15. The maximum number of candidates running across constituencies in 1997 after excluding constituency 28 was 35.

  16. In terms of parties, 47 % of parties were reelected from the same constituency.

  17. This number increases to 39 if we consider any of the constituencies the corresponding 1997 constituency split up into in 2002.

  18. Online Appendix Tables D1 and D2 list the party affiliations of MNAs elected in 1997 and 2002.

  19. Note that I look at political competition growth rates for the vote fraction, vote margin and candidate variables.

  20. The difference in means t-test for vote fraction growth has a value of: |p|>t=0.19; for number of candidates growth the value is: |p|>t=0.39; and for vote margin growth the value is: |p|>t=0.16.

  21. What factors can introduce a bias in these results? First, if the education of legislators in 1997 is misreported, this can bias my estimates downward, so that they place a lower bound on the true effect. Second, the GIS matching may not be perfect, since I constructed the GIS maps based on image files. However, this was the only way this analysis could be done, and it can only cause possible measurement error in the dependent political competition variables which were matched for 2002. It is important to clarify that this possible measurement error would be because of my GIS matching and not as a result of strategic redistricting.

  22. I use small party as a proxy for a smaller pool of educated candidates in a party, but we could look for the actual pool of educated candidates in a party in lists of party members, and therefore use that measure for substitutability. However, this would require not only gathering together historical party lists, but also inquiring into the education levels of all the party members, which would be prohibitive in terms of data requirements.

  23. The results are also robust to excluding independent candidates from the definition of small party, although a little weaker. They are available upon request.

  24. To do this, I need to match parties from the 1997 constituencies to the 2002 constituencies but I cannot use the population-weighted matching method given that parties are a qualitative variable. I therefore use three alternative methods for matching the 1997 constituencies to the 2002 constituencies: the largest area overlap, any area overlap, and an overlap of a certain minimum area (0.38). The results presented here are for the largest area overlap, but those for the other two matching methods are very similar.

  25. Results available upon request.

  26. That is, separately for each year, I define a party as small if it fields 50 or less candidates in that year, and then the small party win variable is an indicator variable for whether the winner from that constituency belongs to a small party in that year.

  27. In addition to the literature referenced above, see Besley and Case (1995).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and three anonymous referees for their excellent comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Madiha Afzal.

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Afzal, M. Do barriers to candidacy reduce political competition? Evidence from a bachelor’s degree requirement for legislators in Pakistan. Public Choice 161, 51–72 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0126-2

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