Factors of Success in Candidate Selection. Political Capital, Political Attitudes and Non-Political Resources of Candidates for the German Bundestag in 2017

In September 2017, the 19th German Bundestag was elected. 4.828 candidates contested for an electoral district and/or a place on a list of a state party; 709 won a seat. But before the voters could make their choice, the candidates had to be nominated within their parties. Little is known about why some candidates are nominated and others not. Closing this research gap is not only important to legislative candidates and for potential candidates but, in a broader sense, also for understanding representative democracy and its functioning. Do the parties select their candidates by criteria the voters expect them to use or do they have different criteria? Are there differences in selection criteria between parties? And how are the two lanes to the German Bundestag - via a district and a party list - (inter)acting? To explore this, we are not just looking at the candidates and their intra-party competition but also at the “selectorates” who decide who succeeds. The empirical base of this paper are the internal processes of candidate nomination for the German federal election in 2017. Qualitative and quantitative data from a research project of the Institute for Parliamentary Research – IParl (Halle, Germany) will be analyzed to draw findings for this paper. Between September 2016 and July 2017, data was collected by teams – employing a triangulation research method – at 112 district- and 54 state-list nomination congresses across Germany. All current parliamentary parties were included (CDU, CSU, SPD, AfD, Liberals, Left Party, Greens). A total of 19,523 electors (party members who nominate a candidate) as well as 1,811 aspirants (individuals who pursue a candidacy) were provided with standardized questionnaires at the meetings visited by IParl’s researchers. 52% of the questioned electors, and 41% of the questioned aspirants returned these surveys. Minutes of 125 nomination conventions were produced. Generally, studying personnel recruitment means observing both the most powerful, and the least understood internal decision-making process of political parties. There are only few scientific findings of what helps aspirants to be nominated. One important approach focuses on the political capital like engagement, networks and formal positions within a party, accumulated during the so-called “Ochsentour”. Other explanatory factors are policy positions and non-political factors like gender, age, ethnicity, education, profession, and financial resources. Our data follow a comparative approach that allows us to differentiate between electors and aspirants at district and state level as well as between the seven parties. Methodologically, we distinguish between successful (likely to be elected), less successful (nominated but not elected), and unsuccessful/failing aspirants (not nominated). According to our questionnaires, we compare these types of aspirants with each other to find out what makes them successful. We test several factors as the political capital operationalized, for instance, by internal party participation. Matches and mismatches in the policy positions of electors and aspirants are measured by statistical indicators developed by recruitment research. Thus, it can be assessed how the different dimensions of the candidate selection process interact and produce a specific outcome.