The Complementarity Advantage: How Parties Manage Effectiveness and Representativeness in Candidate Selection

Selecting good candidates (who win elections) is crucial for political parties’ survival. Parties are quite conservative organizations in that regard. In order to minimize the risk of choosing bad candidates, they re-select incumbents who have already proven themselves in terms electoral potential and party loyalty. Yet, parties increasingly make efforts to select candidates from traditionally marginalized groups. So far, studies have focused on explaining when (under which institutional and party political conditions) and why (for what ideological or strategic reasons) parties increase social representativeness. Few studies however pay attention to how this increase in representativeness comes about and what mechanisms shape the outcome. The latter questions form the central focus of this paper. Based on a case study analysis of women and ethnic minority candidate selection in Belgium (including 22 in-depth interviews with Belgian parties), we find that the political inclusion of newcomers follows a specific pattern. Belgian parties’ growing concern for including women and ethnic minorities respectively brought disproportionately more young women and ethnic minority women into politics. Parties selected these specific sub-groups for top positions on candidate lists because their specific profile or ‘identity mix’ –ethnic minority, female and young– maximized the representativeness of the lists. These sub-groups were able to cash in on what we label a ‘complementarity advantage’ because their profile is complementary to that of the dominant identity features of the incumbents (ethnic majority, male and senior). Furthermore, young ethnic minority women were considered complements rather than competitors of incumbents and as such did not pose a real threat to incumbent power. The logic behind the ‘complementarity advantage’ allows us to theorize the inclusion of new groups in politics: it occurs through the inclusion of a specific sub-group of candidates whose combination of identity features is maximally complementary to the ones of the incumbents.