Jaakko Meriläinen

A vast scholarship questions whether voters are sufficiently informed to act in their best interest at the polling booth, which may also have implications for the quality of political representation. In this study, we examine cognitive and non-cognitive ability tests conducted on (male) military conscripts by the Finnish Defense Forces, and compare local and national election candidates nominated by political parties and representatives elected by voters with each other and the general population. We show that non-elected candidates fare better in the tests than the population, on average, and elected politicians demonstrate even higher levels of ability. Local politicians’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills are on par with individuals who work in high-skill occupations or have at least an undergraduate degree and national politicians are even better. Our findings suggest that, despite the complex decision-making environment inherent in voter-oriented systems, a political class that is more competent, motivated, and honest than the general population emerges. We further discuss the scope for positive political selection of women, show that there is no evident trade-off between politician quality and descriptive representation, and present evidence on the mechanisms for and the policy effects of positive selection.

Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Following recent methodological advances, scholars can choose from various RDD estimators for point estimation and inference. This decision is mainly guided by theoretical results on optimality and Monte Carlo simulations because of a paucity of research on the performance of the different estimators in recovering real-world experimental benchmarks. Leveraging exact ties in personal votes in local elections in Colombia and Finland, which are resolved by a random lottery, we assess the performance of various estimators featuring different polynomial degrees, bias-correction methods, optimal bandwidths, and approaches to statistical inference. Using re-running and re-election as outcomes, we document only minor differences in the performance of the various implementation approaches when the conditional expectation function (CEF) of the outcomes in the vicinity of the discontinuity is close to linear. When approximating the curvature of the CEF is more challenging, bias-corrected and robust inference with coverage-error-rate-optimal bandwidths comes closer to the experimental benchmark than more widely used alternative implementations.

The eastern enlargement of the EU differentially exposed workers in different regions and occupations in Finland to foreign workforce, in particular to posted workers. Using a triple-differences strategy and detailed individual-level administrative data, we document robust evidence that the entry of new EU countries decreased the annual earnings of vulnerable workers relative to less vulnerable workers in the construction sector. This decrease was persistent even ten years after the enlargement and economically meaningful, about 9 percent (roughly a month’s salary per year), on average. We also show a small increase in unemployment and provide evidence on different adjustment mechanisms.

Understanding the political consequences of civil war exposure is a challenging task, given the myriad of overlapping and at times divergent mechanisms involved. This article provides evidence of the persistent political legacy stemming from exposure to a violent class conflict. We revisit the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and first trace out the impact of local conflict exposure on electoral outcomes over a quarter-century period between the World Wars. To do so, we combine a difference-in-differences approach with historical data on the geographical distribution of civil war casualties and election outcomes. We document that the local electoral performance of left-wing parties that were associated with the insurgents was persistently and negatively affected by civil war casualties on both sides of the conflict. We also discuss potential mechanisms behind this finding and further show that the civil war had an enduring impact on the Finnish political landscape over a hundred years.

We study the political economy of government responsiveness in the context of COVID-19 vaccine allocation in Mexico. We first present population-level evidence that the vaccines had positive effects on public health, motivating the plausible electoral value of vaccine distribution. To estimate these effects, we exploit newly collected data on diverse health outcomes and staggered roll-out of vaccines by municipalities and age groups. Our analysis then delves into the electoral predictors and consequences of the vaccination program. Electoral incentives positively correlate with government responsiveness, and vaccine allocation paid off electorally in some locations. Using a difference-in-differences strategy coupled with geographically fine-grained electoral data, which allow us to hold fixed all municipality-level factors that could have mattered for vaccine eligibility, we do not find any evidence that a higher vaccination coverage would have boosted electoral support for the incumbent party, on average. However, there is some evidence of heterogeneous effects. Furthermore, vaccines did increase electoral participation, plausibly by decreasing the perceived cost of voting midst the health crisis.

This study investigates whether incidental electoral successes of women contribute to sustained gender parity in Finland, a leader in gender equality. Utilizing election lotteries used to resolve ties in vote counts, we estimate the causal effect of female representation. Our findings indicate that women’s electoral performance (measured by female seat and vote shares) within parties improves following a lottery win, potentially due to increased exposure. However, these gains are offset by negative spillovers on female candidates from other parties. One reason why this may occur is that voters and parties may perceive sufficient female representation has been achieved, leading to reduced support for female candidates in other parties. Consequently, marginal increases in female representation do not translate to overall gains in women elected. In high but uneven gender parity contexts, such increases may not be self-reinforcing, highlighting the complexity of achieving sustained gender equality in politics.

Pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) may increase parties’ chances of winning an election, but they may also distort electoral results and policies away from citizens’ preferences. To shed light on how PECs shape post-electoral power distribution, we study the causes and consequences of PECs in Finland where elections use an open-list proportional representation system, and parties may form joint lists. We present descriptive evidence showing that PECs are more common between parties of equal size and similar ideology, and when elections are more disproportional or involve more parties. Using difference-in-differences and density discontinuity designs, we illustrate that voters punish coalescing parties and target personal votes strategically within the coalitions, and that PECs are formed with the particular purpose of influencing the distribution of power. PECs increase small parties’ chances of acquiring leadership positions, lead to more dispersed seat distributions, and sometimes prevent absolute majorities. They can thus enable a broader representation of citizens’ policy preferences.

We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting. This model entails multiple equilibria, and we focus on cases where political collusion occurs. When parties hold different opinions on some policy, they may take different policy positions that do not coincide with the median voter's preferred policy platform. In contrast, when parties have a mutual understanding on a particular policy, their policy positions may converge (on some dimension) but not to the median voter's preferred policy. That is to say, parties can tacitly collude with one another, despite political competition. Collusion may collapse, for instance, after the entry of a new political party. This model rationalizes patterns in survey data from Sweden, where politicians on different sides of the political spectrum take different positions on economic policy but similar positions on refugee intake-diverging from the average voter's position, but only until the entry of a populist party.

This paper employs newly collected historical data from Finland to present evidence of historically contingent, long-run consequences of a famine. We document high levels of local inequality in terms of income and land distribution until a violent uprising in 1918. These inequalities partly originated from the famine of 1866-1868, which increased the concentration of land and power to large landowners. We further show that regions with more exposure to the famine had more labor coercion by the early 1900s. These inner tensions led to violent conflict following the Russian Revolution and the Finnish independence from the Russian Empire. Using microdata on all the casualties of the 1918 Finnish Civil War, we demonstrate that the famine plausibly contributed to local insurgency participation through these factors. Although unsuccessful in replacing the government, the insurgency led to significant policy changes, including radical land redistribution and a full extension of the franchise. These national reforms led to a more drastic shift toward equality in locations more affected by the famine with greater pre-conflict inequality. Our findings highlight how historical shocks can have large and long-lasting, but not straightforward impacts.

Does political selection matter for policy in representative governments? I use administrative data on local politicians in Finland and exploit exogenous variation generated by close elections to show that electing more high-income, incumbent and competent politicians (who earn more than observably similar politicians) improves fiscal sustainability outcomes, but does not decrease the size of the public sector. I also provide suggestive evidence that electing more university-educated local councillors leads to more public spending without adverse effects on fiscal sustainability. I reconcile these findings with survey data on candidate ideology and demonstrate that different qualities are differentially associated with economic ideology.