Taking the Plunge: Exploring Candidacy Motivations in Proportional Multi-Party Democracies

Why do people decide to run for political office? While this question is central to understanding the supply side of democratic representation, existing research remains limited by its predominant focus on American single-member district systems, its reliance on a classical definition of political ambition, its use of survey-based measures ill-suited to capturing the subjective meaning of candidacy motivations and its disconnect from the broader political participation literature, which theorises forms of engagement but rarely extends to candidacy. This paper addresses the gaps related to candidacy by examining the drivers of political ambition among first-time candidates in proportional multi-party democracies, through the case of Belgium. The study builds on classical political ambition theory (Schlesinger, 1966) and draws from the 'general incentives theory' of political participation (Seyd and Whiteley, 1992). The study draws on approximately sixty in-depth interviews with first-time candidates who stood in the 2024 Belgian triple elections, conducted across Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels, and the full spectrum of political parties. Preliminary evidence, from related empirical work, challenges the classical definition of political ambition, showing that the nascent-to-expressive sequence does not always hold, as candidates often do not report prior interest before being approached. It also shows that motivations to enter are diverse, identity-sensitive and not always inherently political. Finally, the study offers the first conceptual model mapping the drivers of political ambition, the range of reasons behind candidates' entry into electoral politics.