The Supply and Demand Model Revisited: Some Reflections

When Pippa Norris and I developed the supply and demand model for the research that was published in Political Recruitment (1995) , we were really only at the start of a process of thinking about how institutions were gendered. We started to develop the research model during the 1980s only shortly after the first publication in 1984 of March and Olsen’s seminal essay ‘The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life’ in the American Political Science Review and well before the development of the now huge literature and body of research that developed from it. Even so we focused on power in particular institutions – British Political parties - and designed our research to illuminate the various gender effects. The result was the supply and demand model which we developed from an idea originally put forward by Vicky Randall in Women and Politics (1987). Our understanding was that candidate selection was an interactive process in which both selectors and aspirants affected outcomes that were organised in several sets of institutions. We always intended to follow it up but it proved difficult to get funding that enabled us to look again at both sides of the process simultaneously. I think there is a case to redo the research looking at both selectorate and selected combining qualitative and quantitative approaches as we did then. There is also a case for linking to attitude and ambition data. In this paper I put forward ideas and arguments about what might be done differently, taking into account the theoretical and methodological innovations of the succeeding generation of scholars who have used the model.