ABSTRACT
Candidate selection is said to be critical to politics (Hazan and Rahat 2010). While this statement has been widely shared, little empirical research actually tested the relationship between the selection methods and the kind of candidates’ profiles issuing from the selection process. Gender as a major personal trait of the candidates is scrutinized in this chapter. It investigates to what extent candidate selection processes matter for the gender diversity on electoral lists. 143 electoral list drafting processes in the run-up to the 2014 regional, federal, and European elections in Belgium are quantitatively analysed thanks to a ‘gender-balancedness’ index calculating the share of women among the candidates in realistic list positions. The main findings are that selectorates selected more women on the most eligible positions when they were decentralized, when a gender quota applied for their composition and when the process was less institutionalized. Hereby the chapter suggests that party politics is definitely relevant to politics in general, and to the descriptive representation of gender among political elites in particular.
