Party elites selecting candidates are crucial for the composition of parliament. Yet, despite their pivotal position within the party, we know only little about their preferences for potential candidates and how their own backgrounds shape these preferences. This paper presents results from a conjoint experiment carried out with party delegates chosen to select the candidates for five German parties in the run-up to three state elections. Theoretical expectations derived from the principle-agent framework on delegates’ preferences in candidates are evaluated. Analyses show that delegates prefer attributes indicative of quality and socio-demographic similarity in candidates. Additionally, I show that these preferences for candidates differ between inexperienced and experienced delegates, the latter showing a stronger preference for valence attributes in candidates. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of personal attributes of selectors for candidate selection and hold crucial implications for the composition of legislatures and long-term effects on public policy.

Extant research suggests that candidate selection methods can be consequential for party unity in legislative voting. Yet thus far, only variations in the selectorate and the degree of centralization have been examined. This article argues that Candidacy Eligibility Criteria (CEC), too, have implications for party unity. I theorize that with stricter formal requirements, parties avoid adverse selection and ensure the nomination of committed candidates. By using roll-call vote data from 16 industrial democracies, candidate surveys and an original data set consisting of nearly 500 historical party constitutions, I show that parties demanding prior membership and nudging aspirants to maintain networks within the party tend to be more unified in parliamentary voting. Moreover, their candidates, too, express greater loyalty when compared with parties without formal CEC. Thus, this article contributes to the literatures on party unity and on candidate selection by showing how certain party rules, hitherto neglected, affect party unity.

Party membership seems to lose relevance for political careers in many established democracies. Increasing numbers of parties are recruiting non-members as candidates. Yet, what are the implications of a lack of long-term party membership for party cohesion? In this paper, I argue that pre-parliamentary party membership is in fact crucial for cohesion. Using data from the Comparative Candidate Survey and voting behavior of ca. 2,000 MPs of the German Bundestag on free votes from 1953 to 2013, I examine the effect of length of previous party membership and the age of joining the party on indicators of party cohesion. Examining free votes allows for credibly controlling alternative explanations of unified voting behavior. Results are in line with expectations generated from social identity theory and underscore the importance of party membership for party cohesion. The paper concludes with a discussion on the findings’ implications in light of recent developments in parties’ candidate recruitment.

Policy in coalition governments (a) depends on negotiations between parties that (b) continue between elections. No extant means of predicting policy—bargaining power indices, vote shares, seat shares, polling, veto players or measures of electoral competitiveness—recognizes both of these facts. We conceptualize, estimate and validate the first dynamic measure of parties’ bargaining leverage intended to predict policy and politics. We argue that those parties with the greatest leverage in policy negotiations are those with the highest probability of participating in an alternative government, were one to form. Combining a large set of political polls and an empirical coalition formation model developed with out-of-sample testing, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 21 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. Applications to government spending and to the stringency of environmental policy show leverage from coalition inclusion probabilities to be strongly predictive while the primary alternatives—vote shares, seat shares and polls—are not.

Candidate‐selection methods (CSM) crucially affect the behavior of Members of Parliament (MPs). Extant research investigates the consequentiality of the selectorate, but is neglecting the candidacy dimension of CSM. But what are the behavioral implications of minimal candidacy‐eligibility criteria (CEC)? I theorize that parties adopt closed CEC in safe districts to ensure nominating loyalist candidates, while they use open CEC in contested districts to attract entrepreneur candidates able to woo decisive swing voters. Using survey and observational data from Japan, where parties have concurrently been nominating candidates through open and more closed CEC, I show that entrepreneur candidates are more responsive to their districts but less active in the legislature, measured by different types of activities. These findings corroborate my expectations that entrepreneur candidates lack political experience and are sidelined by their more traditional colleagues. Moreover, the results broaden our understanding of how CSM affect MPs’ behavior.