‘Keep friends close, but enemies closer’: connections and political careers

Using newly collected data on ties between local politicians in Italy from 1985 onwards, this paper studies the relation between cross-party connections and future career prospects. Exploiting a difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that ruling coalition members connected with the leader of the opposition in local councils are twice as likely to be promoted to the local government. The results are confirmed with a number of placebo exercises. Interestingly, the effect of connections with the leader of the rivals disappears when I consider appointments to boards of state-owned enterprises or to other councils in which the party faces different politicians as opponents. A possible mechanism that may account for these results is that connected politicians act as political brokers and smooth the relationship between government and opposition. Finally, connected politicians are less educated than the average appointed official, indicating that political selection is negatively affected (Besley et al. in Econ J 121(554):F205–F227, 2011).