Recruitment and Selection for Elected Office

Abstract

Candidate recruitment and selection determines who is elected to participate in elections and eventually govern a polity. As a result of its critical role for representation and how a democratic political system functions, political scientists have developed an extensive literature on recruitment and selection, exploring the theme theoretically and empirically, both over time and across polities. The literature regarding political recruitment and candidate selection of elected offices touches many central aspects of party politics, and thus a bibliography can be extremely broad. It could include, for example, the extensive literature on reelection and the advantages of incumbency, as well as the tremendous body of works that focus on the US South during the period of one-party hegemony. Recruitment, further, could touch on social theory about how citizens are informally attracted to participate. This bibliography, however, will focus on works that deal explicitly with the selection and recruitment of elected offices, dividing the works into those that focus on the United States and those considering other world regions. Works in both parts also include extensive theoretical discussions. The bibliography is further divided based on works that consider executives and legislatures. In addition to general theory, it includes an extensive section on primaries both for the US case and in a comparative perspective, and offers a short section on studies that provide databases. One special topic that it considers is gender, which we cover by considering studies that evaluate quotas, biases, and the propensity of women to participate in electoral politics. Overall, the literature asks two basic questions: (1) How do the recruitment methods affect the types of candidates selected? (2) What are the political impacts of those methods? A third, related, question is also asked: What drives the choice of the methods themselves? Among the themes covered by the literature cited in this bibliography are rules and regulations governing the process, the party system and other contextual variables (e.g., federalism) that affect who is involved in selecting or naming candidates, party recruitment strategies, the influence of money and the media on candidate selection, voter knowledge about candidates, how and the extent to which voters participate in the process, and the influence of any of these factors on representation, campaigns, and legislator or party behavior.