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

Why and how 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 and its reliance on survey-based measures ill-suited to capturing the subjective meaning of the candidacy decision. This paper addresses that gap by examining the motivations of first-time candidates in Belgium. Drawing on the Goal Affordance framework (Schneider et al., 2016) as a theoretical scaffold, and adopting an abductive approach to theory-building, the study will draw on approximately sixty in-depth interviews with first-time candidates who stood in the 2024 Belgian triple elections, conducted across Flanders and Wallonia and the full spectrum of political parties. Preliminary findings, drawn from related empirical work suggest that candidacy motivations are shaped by a combination of individual goals, early exposure to politics, and relational dynamics, most notably formal recruitment by party actors, pointing to the need to (re)conceptualise political ambition as relational rather than purely individual. The study aims to produce an empirically grounded conceptual model of candidacy motivations that speaks to proportional multi-party systems beyond the contexts for which existing theory was designed. The literature on political ambition is dominated by North American quantitative research that conceptualises ambition in relatively static and individualised terms. It focuses primarily on nascent political ambition (i.e., very early interest in candidacy) among lay citizens, rather than on expressive ambition (i.e., active interest in candidacy) as experienced by actual candidates. Moreover, it often neglects how ambition is shaped by institutional contexts such as proportional representation (PR lists) and multiparty competition. As a result, we still know little about how prospective parliamentary actors in European systems experience, interpret, and navigate their pathways to parliament over time. This paper addresses these gaps through a theory-building qualitative study of how political ambition structures entry into and disengagement from parliamentary candidacy in Belgium. It develops a conceptual model of candidacy mapping reasons for entry and for exit. The methodology is based on a two-phased qualitative design combining narrative and semi-structured interviews with a diverse set of federal and regional election candidates. The sample includes both “rookies” running for the first time in 2024 and “discretes” who stood as candidates in 2019 but chose not to run again in 2024, allowing the analysis to capture both entry into and withdrawal from the parliamentary track. Soft quotas ensure variation across parties to examine how ideological positioning shapes motivations to (not) run (anymore). By focusing on the Belgian case, this paper uncovers what motivates individuals to seek parliamentary office and what barriers lead them to refrain from running again in a proportional, multiparty European context. In doing so, it contributes to the study of parliamentary actors by showing how political pathways are produced before individuals ever take a seat, with important implications for the composition of parliaments and for whose voices ultimately come to be represented within them.