Central to this paper is an attempt of revisiting of comparative political recruitment theories, applied to the presence of women in legislatives and executives of European countries. Actual studies unanimously show that cultural, economic and institutional variables are responsible for the outcome of political recruitment, but most of them are based on cross sectional comparative perspective only. That is, in order to know why some countries have less women in their representative institutions, inference is done comparing snapshots of contextual and country-level characteristics. Most studies on gender representation consider legislative elections as being the core process of representation; meanwhile executive appointments are less studied given the evident difficulty of collection of comparative data for selection of ministers and the role of gender variable during this process and for its outcome. We propose a double perspective for testing the replicability of the actual theories of recruitment: a legislative-executive comparison on a longer time span. Given the very different representative and recruitment nature of these two institutions, the legislative-executive comparison would reveal the extent to which identical factors produce different outcomes at the same moment in a country (e.g. explaining those cases when the share of women in executives are much lower than those in parliament, in the same context). Then, a longitudinal perspective would reveal those conditions under which institutional designs start to produce their expected effects (e.g.that is to try to explain why and how does change of gender representation occur when cultural and institutional conditions remain the same in a given country). Some preliminary results based on evidence for the last 20 years for 27 EU countries, show that theories developed in Western countries do not have the same replication power in a Eastern European/post-communist countries. Important contextual-level conditions filter the expected effects of institutions, making them produce different degrees of representativeness. Put it differently, institutions matter, but politics in time matters even more.
