Opening up the Black Box: Gender and Candidate Selection in a New Era

Recent global developments including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas have transformed how parties and legislatures operate. This article 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 to empirically examine 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.