In this contribution we are interested in the connection between party organisation and political careers in multilevel systems. We contend that by studying candidates for parliamentary office – and not only the elected ones – we can learn more about both the organisation of political parties and the properties and incentives of the institutional environment in which they operate. First, the candidates is what the electorate is faced with, hence we need to pay more attention to its composition of we are interested in the precise multilevel character of the encompassing (national) democracy. Second, because candidates are put forth by parties and because their prior experience depends on institutional opportunities, studying candidates also informs our understanding of parties and their interaction with institutions at different levels. We thus develop a typology of candidates with or without subnational party and/or public office experience and use survey data of candidates in the Swiss parliamentary elections of October 2011 to draw conclusions on its analytical usefulness. We will show that our typology is able to capture important general attributes of the Swiss system, such as integrated vertical careers with a high degree of emphasis placed on subnational experience and cross-cantonal as well as cross-party variation. Moreover, the application of the typology reveals the salience of parties as gatekeepers for political career even in systems, such as the Swiss, where parties have traditionally considered weak.
