Gender Quotas Vs Meritocracy

I was waiting for a "research digest" of this great economic research paper, and now it has arrived. The idea is to study the impact of a gender quota on the competence of political leaders. That is no easy task: quotas are not introduced randomly, which means that studying the effect is difficult; and measuring competence is not easy (most use "education", but that is clearly just a proxy). 

Enter Sweden, where data is available on almost everyone and everything, and the social democrats introduced a strict quota on how they set up party lists. The results?

Mediocre leaders have a strong incentive to surround themselves with mediocre followers, so as to bolster their chances of remaining in power. A less acknowledged role of quotas is to create a threat to such cozy arrangements. It is this idea that our research on Sweden has investigated. Our main finding is that gender quotas increase the competence of the political class in general, and among men in particular. Moreover, quotas are indeed bad news for mediocre male leaders who tend to be forced out.

It is a well-written explainer of a complicated (you cannot study these things by simple means) research paper. 

(Full disclosure: I did my PhD at Stockholm University and know the authors.)