ABSTRACT
Political parties are central actors in the Danish representative democracy. Candidate nomination lies at the heart of what political parties do. But the pool of party members has become much smaller over the years. Party members are to a larger extent than party voters men, older, longer-educated and with higher income. They place themselves more to the extreme on the left–right dimension. Hence, parties as a channel of participation and interest aggregation are skewed. A fifth of the party members indicate that they are willing to stand for election if encouraged by their party, and a little more than that would consider it. Members who would like to stand for election, or would at least consider so, are regarded as making up parties’ recruitment pool. The skewed descriptive representation among party members is further skewed among these potential candidates except for age. Younger members are more likely to be potential candidates, hence counterbalancing their underrepresentation among party members. In sum, the imbalance in descriptive representation is further enforced at the level of the recruitment pool. Hence, parties are to work purposely on encouragement and support to ensure heterogeneous candidate lists.
