No abstract

Preference voting threatens the power of party leaders in PR contexts to enforce party unity and pursue policy by encouraging candidates to groom personal reputations. This study posits that party leadership might be able to enforce party discipline through other means at their disposal even as their control over candidates’ election ranks weakens. These include access to the party label and distribution of senior legislative- and party positions. Using original data from the Czech flexible-list PR context covering the period between 1996 and 2021, this study shows that the MPs who are elected thanks to preference voting are no more likely than their colleagues to individualize their legislative behavior or cast a dissenting roll-call vote. What is more, these popular MPs face a more restricted access to reelection and senior positions that come with agenda-setting power and exposure. This evidence suggests that political parties take active steps to limit the autonomy of the MPs who owe their positions to voters.

While the same formal candidate selection rules are generally in place throughout a state, there is often intracountry variation in male descriptive overrepresentation. To explain this variation, scholars cannot focus exclusively on women (e.g., how do women respond to formal institutional opportunities?) or femininity (e.g., how do norms governing appropriate female behavior affect women's odds of being selected as a candidate?). Rather, scholars must attend to the ways that informal norms regarding masculinity operate across space and time within a country. Drawing on the insights of feminist institutionalism, this essay examines two intracountry sources of variation in candidate selection: the spatial urban-rural divide and temporal differences between first-time recruitment and renomination. While the formal candidate selection rules are uniform, informal institutions vary depending on where and when we look, leading to different levels of male overrepresentation.

Leader-driven personal parties often campaign on a ticket promising elite renewal and novel ways of doing politics. One way of looking apart from the sitting political establishment is to recruit women into visible party positions. This study examines whether personal parties can improve women’s access to reelection by institutionalizing performance-based rules of internal promotion, which are necessitated by the lack of organic party cohesion. A site-intensive study of the Slovak Freedom and Solidarity party identifies a number of gendered structural constraints that impede the party’s female incumbents from excelling in those tasks that are deemed important by the party.

Norms about what constitutes an ideal politician are shown to negatively affect the demand for young political candidates within political parties because they favor qualities that young people have yet to acquire. We ask whether this “youth bias” continues to shape the political opportunities of those young persons who get elected. Drawing on comprehensive, original data encompassing all Czech MPs elected between 1996 and 2021, we analyze potential age-driven heterogeneities in access to valuable political resources and reelection, both of which are subject to party gatekeeping. We find that young MPs are given a privileged access to assignments that facilitate learning about the legislative business and reelection, despite being more likely to cast a dissenting vote at roll call. These results suggest that young MPs, unlike some other political outgroups, are not marginalized by their superiors despite exhibiting certain traits typically associated with political outgroups.