New institutionalism (NI) may no longer qualify as being ‘new’, but since re-emphasizing institutions as a central explanatory variable in political analysis over two decades ago, it continues to provide scholars with a useful perspective through which to analyse political dynamics and outcomes that shape everyday life. The renewed focus on institutions has rebalanced the structure/agency scales back toward the former without losing important insights about the role and impact of political actors. NI has allowed for greater understanding about the co-constitutive nature of politics: the various ways in which actors bring about or resist change in institutions; and the way institutions shape the nature of actors’ behaviour through the construction of rules, norms and policies.

Both feminist and mainstream political science has taken an institutional ‘turn’, opening up possibilities for interchange between the two fields. This article explores the potential for theoretical synthesis between feminist gender analysis and new institutional theory, focusing particularly on issues of power. After providing a brief overview of approaches to power in the institutionalist and feminist literature, it outlines some initial possibilities for dialogue between the two fields. The article concludes by considering some potential insights that a gendered approach to institutions and power would offer to new institutionalism, establishing a preliminary foundation for a wider ‘feminist institutionalist’ research agenda.

Recent global developments, including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas, have transformed the ways in which parties and legislatures operate. This introduction to the special issue 'Candidate Selection: Parties and Legislatures in a New Era' puts these recent developments in context, making the case for revisiting the 'secret garden' of candidate selection in light of this 'new era' in politics. It sets out a critical dialogue between party politics and gender politics scholarship and points to the need for more research on how political parties facilitate or block women's access to political office. Building on the burgeoning research on gender and political recruitment, it outlines how a gendered and institutional approach allows us to retheorize candidate selection processes and opens up new avenues for empirically examining the pathways prior to election. The article then introduces the papers in this special issue and concludes by evaluating the main implications of gendering analyses of candidate selection and party politics more broadly. THE FEMINIZATION OF POLITICS -THAT IS, THE POLITICAL INCLUSIONof women and women's policy concerns -has transformed the social and political context within which parties and legislatures operate. Women activists have been key players in debates over political representation and constitutional and institutional design around the world and have mobilized in social movements at the local, national and global level, as well as within formal organizations such as political parties (Krook 2006). While women are still numerically under-represented in politics, the overall trend is upward, and dramatic jumps in women's political presence have occurred in a diverse range of countries worldwide.

Candidate selection and recruitment has been notably described as the “secret garden” of politics—an obscure process, often hidden from view, that is regulated largely by internal party rules, informal practices, and power relationships (cf. Gallagher and Marsh 1988). In this contribution, we contend that informal party practices and their gendered consequences are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female underrepresentation. Rather than make a strict separation between formal and informal rules in the recruitment process, we argue that gender politics scholars must instead identify and empirically investigate the specific combinations of such rules that impact upon women's and men's political participation in parties. The proposed approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the bounded nature and variable outcomes of institutional innovation and party change.

This contribution evaluates the theoretical and methodological challenges of researching the gendered dynamics of candidate selection in comparative perspective. It argues that comparative studies should take into account not only the gendered nature of political parties and their wider institutional context, but must also investigate the informal aspects of the selection process and their gendered consequences. The article explores these dynamics by revisiting original in-depth research on the candidate selection process in two different settings -Thailand and Scotland. Using a common analytical framework, the article reflects on this work and points to two key aspects of the interaction between formal and informal rules -the gendered consequences of informal party recruitment and of local influence over candidate selection -which are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female under-representation. The article concludes by outlining a research agenda for comparative work on gender, institutions and candidate selection and pointing to future directions for work in this area.Keywords: candidate selection, gender, feminist institutionalism, political parties, informal institutions Investigating the gendered and institutional dimensions of the opportunity structures within political parties is essential in order to explain women's chronic minority status in politics as well as the persistence of male dominance. The small but growing body of work on gender, political parties and candidate selection has contributed many important insights about the