Center for Effective Global Action

Political selection is crucial to the quality of governance. Yet our general knowledge of the individual characteristics that correlate with the political selection process is scant. Our paper contributes to this knowledge gap by collecting detailed data on the quality, perceptions, attitudes, and promises of all candidates involved in a recent local election in rural Uganda. Our context is unique - with two separate governing bodies for males and females. The paper demonstrates, that male and female political selection into these two parallel institutions share important similarities but also differ along several dimensions.