Delighted that our paper on who gets shortlisted and subsequently selected for winnable seats (with @robfordmancs.bsky.social@martamiori.bsky.socialjournals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/.... In short we found that selectorates still discriminate against women and ethnic minorities
Candidate selections are seen as the ‘secret garden’ of UK politics. Hundreds of parliamentary constituencies rarely change hands, meaning that the ‘real electi...
And finally, we found that the barriers start further back in the process; the Tories overwhelmingly shortlisted white or male candidates in winnable seats, and the Lib Dems and SNP also failed to proportionately shortlist ethnic minority candidates in their winnable seats.
We also confirm the huge local bias among selectorates (@tomorrowmps). We looked at the effects of gender, ethnicity, political experience & localness and found that being locally resident was far and away the best predictor of likelihood of being selected
This holds across parties with older women and non-local ethnic minorities least likely to win selection contests. Under emergency procedures women and ethnic minorities fare better, suggesting that snap elections may help improve diversity.
