Is setting a "low bar" on qualifications for elected office similar around the world?

Question

In the United States the official qualifications for becoming president, as laid out in the Constitution, are incredibly low. The only requirements are that:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Is it pretty standard in modern democracies to set the qualifications so low and allow the electorate to vet the appropriateness of the candidates qualifications? Or are there countries that require specific educational and professional achievements from their candidates before they seek high elective office?

Answer 1

Actually, that bar is unusually high.

Very few countries require candidates to be natural-born citizens. For instance, the current (January 2013) Prime Minister of Australia is Julia Gillard, who was born in Wales, not in Australia. Andrew Bonar Law was born in New Brunswick (now in Canada) and was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1922-23.

The age restriction is also unusual; most countries grant the right of candidature at the same time as the right to vote.

The length of residence is unusual too; most countries will allow anyone who is a citizen and a permanent resident to stand, even if they only moved back last week.

Answer 2

If you want to stand for election to Parliament in Britain, you don't even have to be British:

People wishing to stand as an MP must be over 18 years of age, be a British citizen or citizen of a Commonwealth country or the Republic of Ireland.

Answer 3

I don't know about traditional, but in most countries whose system derives from the British Parliamentary system (e.g. UK, Canada, Australia) you can stand as an MP if you are eligible to vote - i.e. you must be a citizen and you must be 18 years old. In some places there are residency requirements too, but they are typically only a few years. If you are elected as an MP there are no further barriers to being Prime Minister (other than getting your fellow MPs to vote for you).

Answer 4

As an example, in Germany there are age and citizenship requirements (these are just be an adult and be a citizen, no "natural bornness" required, and no extra age except for president).

In particulra, there are no professional or educational conditions. We had both ministers without Abitur (high school diploma) and PhDs.

I guess the idea is that if the people consider someone a good representative of their views and interests, that's really all that's needed. This is in contrast to civil service positions, which are usually not elected, and which do require certain qualifications.

Answer 5

There are many places where there are high bars to political participation. In Russia, Navalny is prohibited from running for political office as a result of him being convicted of a crime. In Iran, candidates must be vetted by religious authorities. In China, they must be communist. In Montana, officials can be barred from speaking on the floor for criticizing Republican policies.

It is not just "standard" to "allow the electorate to vet the appropriateness of the candidates qualifications", that's pretty much the definition of "democracy". In a comment, you say "It seems reasonable to me that countries would demand more of their leaders." This suggests that there is some entity that the term "country" refers to, other than the will of the people. If decisions as to who is entitled to run for office are made by some entity that claims the right to overrule the people as to what the will of "the country" is, that's not democracy. If someone has to have a certain degree from an accredited institution to run for office, then those institutions are acting as a ruling class. And who decides what institutions gets to be "accredited"?

Answer 6

Or are there countries that require specific educational and professional achievements from their candidates before they seek high elective office?

Marx and Engels had famously proposed that under Communism the state should be run by people specifically trained in the principles of Marxism, i.e., in the principles of building and running a just society - the Party. They came with this idea when it became obvious that, despite the predictions of Marx, the proletariat failed to organize itself and engage in the revolutionary struggle. Hence, it was left up to the intellectuals (professional revolutionaries) to educate the proletariat and organize it - even though these intellectuals were not a part of the proletariat themselves. (Marx and Engels led a rather bourgeois life, typical of educated people in their times. Many of their followers were not proletarians either - notably Lenin and Che Guevara.)

The Marxist point of view was then criticized, as instead of a classless society it led to emergence of a New Class of party functionaries. It also undermined the Marxist doctrine that the class owning the means of production exercises disproportionate political power and uses its to own advantage, as in capitalism - here the party functionaries officially owned nothing, but lived in luxury and abused their power on massive scale.

Whether one considers various states built upon Marxist principles democratic is a matter of debate - this is certainly how they described themselves.