Candidate Selection and Policy Implementation in a Single-Party State

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How do candidate selection processes shape policy outcomes? Studying Tanzania’s initial single-party legislative elections, I assess how electing candidates preferred by party elites affected policy implementation, which emphasized rural development during this period. Leveraging the deterministic assignment of ballot symbols—which was orthogonal to candidate characteristics but had large electoral effects—finds their election substantially increased the supply of policy-prioritized local public goods. Elites positively selected candidates using hard-to-observe characteristics and understood quicker than voters the value of candidates’ central state connections. The results rationalize elites’ enduring influence over selection processes and underscore the distributive consequences of candidate selection even absent inter-party competition.