used to produce these estimates are subject to the imprecision associated with household surveys and describe processes and outcomes over which representatives of the village development councils potentially have limited influence, these estimates are likely attenuated by measurement error. At a minimum, the results show that the faster speed by which projects in villages assigned to at-large elections are implemented does not come at the cost of lesser quality projects.

# 7 Discussion

According to our theoretical model, electoral rules affect the competence of elected representatives by changing voter incentives to support candidates with more extreme policy preferences over more qualified candidates. The results from the field experiment are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model. In particular, we find that the competence of elected representatives is higher in villages assigned to at-large elections and that this difference is higher in more heterogeneous villages. There is also evidence that, in more heterogeneous villages, district elections lead to the election of representatives with more extreme policy preferences and lower levels of competence.

There are several possible alternative explanations for the positive effect of at-large elections on the quality of candidates. First, the effect may be a mechanical product of the geographic restrictions imposed by district elections on candidate selection, which preclude the election of multiple competent candidates residing in the same electoral district. The viability of this explanation is explored by examining the distribution of elected council members across districts. As prescribed, villages with district elections had exactly one male representative elected from each district. Although at-large elections imposed no formal restrictions on the geographic distribution of representatives, the distribution was similar to that in villages with district elections. Specifically, in villages with at-large elections, 93 percent of districts had a person residing in that district elected to the council. Only 37 out of 125 at-large villages had at least one district which did not have a resident council member and, of these, 25 villages had only one district that did not have a resident representative. Thus, the effect of at-large elections on the probability of a district not having a resident council member was very small.

To further test the viability of the explanation, we exclude from the sample representatives from those districts that, in at-large elections, had more than one representative elected to the council.<sup>50</sup> Thus, we look only at the quality of candidates for whom the geographical restriction was not binding. While the results are to be interpreted with caution given the endogeneity of the restriction, we find that the sample restriction has no effect on estimates obtained by the benchmark specification (Table C4 in Appendix C). Finally, the restriction on candidates’ residence in district elections should matter more in smaller villages. However, empirical results indicate that the effect of electoral rules on the quality of candidates is stronger in larger, rather than smaller, villages. Overall, these results indicate that the effect of electoral rules on the quality of elected representatives is not affected by the geographic restriction on representatives imposed by district elections.

Another alternative explanation is that the larger district magnitude associated with at-large elections makes it harder for pre-existing elites to coordinate voting, which in turn reduces

> 50 Ideally, we would exclude districts with more than one candidate of high quality, but since all villagers are considered candidates and we do not have a full census of the villages, we cannot implement this strategy.

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