Electoral Systems and Political Personnel Selection in Multi-level Polities

What is the impact of the electoral system — and changes in the electoral system — on how political parties recruit candidates and how they assign their successful candidates to party, legislative, and executive posts? To what extent, and in what ways, do electoral systems shape how parties use the processes of recruitment and post assignment to make connections with constituencies? These are important questions for understanding the larger process of democratic representation. The purpose of this proposal is to attract empirical papers that investigate these questions with comparative and single country studies, as well as theoretical and conceptual contributions on how change in electoral systems can determine the ways in which parties recruit candidates and assign legislators to posts. This panel will focus on the peculiar dynamics of multi-level polities.