The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden
Open accessAbstract
We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in Swedish data. We use a novel approach, based on register data for the earnings of the whole population, to measure the competence of all politicians in 7 parties, 290 municipalities, and 10 elections (for the period 1982–2014). We ask how competence was affected by a zipper quota, requiring local parties to alternate men and women on the ballot, implemented by the Social Democratic Party in 1993. Far from being at odds with meritocracy, this quota raised the competence of male politicians where it raised female representation the most. We argue that resignation of mediocre male leaders was a key driver of this effect. (JEL D72, J16)
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India
Chattopadhyay, R., & Duflo, E. (2004) · Econometrica · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2004.00539.x · Cited by 2,284
An Economic Model of Representative Democracy
Besley, T., & Coate, S. (1997) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355397555136 · Cited by 1,649
Self-citationPolitical Cycles and the Macroeconomy
Alesina, A., Roubini, N., & Cohen, G. D. (1997) · The MIT Press eBooks · doi:10.7551/mitpress/5437.001.0001 · Cited by 1,519
A Model of Political Competition with Citizen-Candidates
Osborne, M. J., & Slivinski, A. (1996) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/2946658 · Cited by 1,246
Children and Gender Inequality: Evidence from Denmark
Kleven, H., Landais, C., & Søgaard, J. E. (2019) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · doi:10.1257/app.20180010 · Cited by 1,064
Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias? *
Beaman, L., Chattopadhyay, R., Duflo, E., Pande, R., & Topalova, P. (2009) · Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/qjec.2009.124.4.1497 · Cited by 1,060
Electoral engineering: voting rules and political behavior
(2004) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.42-1232 · Cited by 845
Krook, M. L. (2009) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195375671.001.0001 · Cited by 688
The Labor Market Returns to Cognitive and Noncognitive Ability: Evidence from the Swedish Enlistment
Lindqvist, E., & Vestman, R. (2011) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · doi:10.1257/app.3.1.101 · Cited by 676
Earnings Functions, Rates of Return and Treatment Effects: The Mincer Equation and Beyond
Heckman, J. J., Lochner, L., & Todd, P. (2005) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.779064 · Cited by 504
Cited by
Field Experiments on Discrimination
(2017) · Handbook of Economic Field Experiments · doi:10.1016/bs.hefe.2016.08.004 · Cited by 910
Difference-in-Differences Estimators of Intertemporal Treatment Effects
de Chaisemartin, C., & D’Haultfœuille, X. (2026) · Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.1162/rest_a_01414 · Cited by 740
The Ties That Double Bind: Social Roles and Women's Underrepresentation in Politics
TEELE, D. L., KALLA, J., & ROSENBLUTH, F. (2018) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s0003055418000217 · Cited by 382
All Male Panels? Representation and Democratic Legitimacy
Clayton, A., O'Brien, D. Z., & Piscopo, J. M. (2019) · American Journal of Political Science · doi:10.1111/ajps.12391 · Cited by 322
Metadata
- Authors
- Besley, T., Folke, O., Persson, T., & Rickne, J.
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2017-08-01
- Volume
- 107
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 2204-2242
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W211437167
- Cited by
- 480
- References
- 36
- FWCI
- 74.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/aer.20160080
- The paper
- Besley, T., Folke, O., Persson, T., & Rickne, J. (2017). Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden. American Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20160080
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
