Where does the pipeline leak? Pathways to candidacy in the Czech Pirate Party

While the women’s underrepresentation in politics and on elected positions remains a key issue, a large amount of research focused on the effect of party quotas for candidates on party lists. However, we do not know much about the internal processes within political parties that generate the underrepresentation, partly due to the opacity of internal processes of political parties. Although, there are some studies that tried to remedy the situation by focusing on particular parts of the pipeline such as studying potential candidates (Fox, Lawless, and Feeley 2001; Fox and Lawless 2004) or gatekeepers within the parties (Cheng and Tavits 2011), the whole pipeline which must be undertaken to become a candidate remains understudied. Thus, this paper utilizes the case of the Czech Pirate Party whose internal processes are organized on its online forum which is open to the public to study the whole pipeline from party membership, through candidate selection process (nomination into the party primaries and voting in the party primaries deciding the composition of party candidate list) to the composition of elected deputies in regional election in 2020 and parliamentary election in 2021, in particular by focusing on how the women’s representation changes in each step of the process.