We evaluate the effect of providing voters with a set of information about candidates' curriculum. The information set is comprised of basic information derived from candidates¿ curriculum (education, work, and political experience). The set mimics transparency requirements introduced by the recently introduced Italian law against corruption (¿Legge spazzacorrotti¿).
To evaluate the informational effect on voting behavior we organized a dedicated campaign on transparency of the candidates. The evaluation is made trough a panel survey experiment where we will expose treatment group individuals to the campaign while covering the campaign to control group individuals. The informational treatment is an invitation to visit a website with information about candidates.
We also develop:
- a dataset of curriculum of candidates constructed using text mining tecniques
-a GIS dataset of Rome Electoral district (Sezioni)
Through a brief analysis of the literature, we can highlight two important points: first, most of this literature has focused its attention on the capability of sanctioning incumbent performance. The typical experiment regards providing voters with information on incumbent performance (legislative activity, efforts, etc¿) . Second, the bulk of the literature on this topic focused especially on developing countries, where often a general lack of freedom of expression (and transparency) makes the availability of information very limited.
While we follow this literature, we differ on two main aspects. First, we focus on the capability of voters to evaluate ex-ante candidates' potential. That is, we do not focus only on the mechanisms of ¿sanctioning¿ incumbent performance. Instead, we look at the informational effect of basic characteristics that describe the ex-ante candidate¿s potential. When we use this approach, we encompass the fact that voters might look at elections as a selection mechanism rather than a sanctioning mechanism (Ashworth, 2012; Fearon, 1999). Second, we move the lens of investigation to the municipal elections of a Western democracy (Rome, Italy), in a context where the availability of information about candidates is supposedly less scarce than in developing countries.
Specifically, we evaluate the effect of providing voters with a set of information about candidates' curriculum. The set of information is comprised of basic information deducted from candidates¿ curriculum (education, work, and political experience).
We believe it worthy to study these characteristics of candidates (instead of past performance) for a variety of reasons.
First, these characteristics (education, work and political experience) have been proven to impact voter behavior that uses these traits as shortcuts to evaluate candidates (Campbell & Cowley, 2014; Mechtel, 2014).
Second, the information we provide is very basic, e.g. it does not require any kind of political sophistication
Third, we can evaluate the impact on candidates that have no experience. It is worth mentioning that non-incumbent candidates (freshmen) are the most numerous candidates in the multi-member electoral system.
Fourth, in our case study, we use information that is, in principle, already available to the public. However, this information is difficult to collect and process. The high number of candidates (more than 4000) makes the use of this information quite difficult to summarize for the average voter. That is, we increase the usability of this information, and we reduce the cost of access by delivering voters an easy-readable summary.
Fifth, the set of information is taken from compulsory transparency requirements introduced by law against corruption recently introduced (¿Legge spazzacorrotti¿). This ensures the non-partisanship of information.
Sixth, the informational campaign we organized mimics some real examples of the campaign organized by civil society in Italy. We are thus replicating a previous real case where civil society organizations try to use political transparency as an instrument for influencing elections .