What a Selectorate Wants, What a Selectorate Needs: Candidate Selection Strategy and its Impact on Women’s Representation

In this paper, we focus on the process of candidate selection and offer an analysis of the skills, traits, and even personalities that the party selectorate looks for in potential candidates, and consider the impact of these priorities on the selection of women candidates. Our goal is to join together the literatures on candidate selection and women’s representation, and provide a new understanding of what the party selectorate wants in their prospective candidates as well as how these priorities affect the rates at which women are chosen for candidate lists. To do so, we offer a new system of classifying candidate traits that are potentially valuable to selectors (e.g., policy behavior that reflects the policy goals of the selectorate, behavior that reflects loyalty to the selectorate, basic measures of candidate quality such as incumbency, etc). Then, we consider the contextual factors that may change the value of these candidate traits, such as whether the electoral system includes a personal vote and the composition of the selectorate itself. Finally, we analyze the ways in which the goals of the party elites may be different from the goals of the selectorate, and consider the impact of this difference on the number of women selected for party lists. We offer an analysis of descriptive data of candidates in Chile and Costa Rica, and find evidence at the incentive to cultivate a personal vote does indeed seem to trigger the selectorate to be attentive to the preferences of their own voters, thereby offering different types of women candidates depending on party ideology.