Networks and Candidate Selection in Consolidating Democracies

• In Event: Party Activists, Recruitment and Party-Building

Abstract

In contrast to the rich literature on clientelism and voting in consolidating democracies, there is less understanding of the candidate selection processes. What motivates individuals to run? How do parties choose candidates? This paper presents results from Cambodia and the Philippines combining field experiments crowd-sourcing candidates at the community level with detailed social network data, in order to show how party institutionalization affects the response to interventions to increase the number of female candidates at the local level. These types of interventions are particularly important in countries without institutionalized parties at the local level, such as the Philippines. However, even in single-party contexts such as Cambodia, parties were open to input from the communities: the community-based treatment to identify female candidates led to an increase of 3 more female candidates than communes in the control group, an increase of 19% over the average number of female candidates in the control group.

Author

• Cesi Cruz, University of California, Los Angeles