A Few Signatures Matter: Candidacy Requirements in Italian Local Elections

Signature requirements (that is, asking potential candidates to collect signatures among eligible voters to participate in an election) are used in democracies all around the world to regulate the submission of political... [ view full abstract ]

Signature requirements (that is, asking potential candidates to collect signatures among eligible voters to participate in an election) are used in democracies all around the world to regulate the submission of political candidatures. This paper examines the causal effect of signature requirements on different electoral outcomes. I use data on Italian municipalities and apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) -exploiting that signature requirements are only present in municipalities of more than 1000 inhabitants- to estimate the effect of these requirements on electoral competition, candidates' selection and voters participation. I find that asking citizens to collect subscriptions significantly reduces the number of candidates and non-marginal candidates, decreases electoral competition, and leads to an older pool of candidates. Signature requirements lead also to a large drop in voters' electoral participation. These results allow to disentangle the mechanisms at play, pointing to signature requirements acting more as non-trivial running costs discouraging potentially non-marginal candidates than just as a screening tool to avoid frivolous ones.

Findings highlight that the impact of signature requirements goes beyond the stated goal of ensuring the representativeness of the candidates, and call for a careful normative evaluation of this policy.