Recruitment Procedures of Political Parties in Europe – Bottleneck to Women’s Representation?

Gendered candidate selection procedures have been hypothesized to directly affect women’s representation in legislatures. Although recent research has started to shed light on the impact of political parties’ recruitment strategies on women’s legislative presence, the relationship between candidate selection procedures and gender continues to be under-researched. This paper contributes to this emerging research agenda by analyzing the ‘secret garden’ of political recruitment cross-nationally. How do procedural variations in political recruitment practices (i.e. the selection criteria and formal characteristics for candidate nominations as specified in laws, regulations and statutes of political parties) affect the proportion of women nominated on party lists? By employing a comparative research design— drawing on an original data set covering 40 political parties in 10 EU member states—the paper seeks to capture the complexities of candidate selection procedures. More specifically, it investigates the effects of territorial centralization and inclusiveness of selectorates on the composition of lists. The results of the analyses are expected to show that a higher degree of territorial centralization and inclusiveness during the recruitment procedures positively affect the proportion of women nominated on party lists. If variations in nomination strategies explain a substantial amount of the cross-national variation in the numbers of nominated women, this suggests that demand-side factors, in addition to supply-side factors, shape the descriptive representation of women.