The Study of Political Candidates

Although there exists a wide range of views about what democracy means, there is a general consensus in defining democratic regimes in terms of regular, free and fair elections. In many countries, parties are the primary actors in organizing elections, so that a widely accepted statement in political science affirms that they “created democracy and that modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties” (Schattschneider, 1942: 1). Parties define the rules governing the electoral competition and control the recruitment of candidates for elective offices, hence determining the distribution of power and the identity of political elites, and finally shaping the chain of democratic accountability that links citizens and elected representatives. The study of political candidates – who eventually form the teams that compete for popular support, defining the composition of parliaments and governments – is therefore related to the very nature of representation, and allows to cast light on important issues such as party competition, intra-party politics and the functioning of legislative assemblies. The focus on individual candidates is also driven by a methodological interest in going beyond the empirically disputable “parties-as-unitary-actors” assumption, as well as by a substantial desire to understand the trend towards the personalization of politics (Karvonen, 2010; McAllister, 2007; Rahat and Sheafer, 2007) and the recent changes in the workings of parties as intermediaries between citizens and the state (Katz and Mair, 1995; Thomassen, 2014). The goal of this contribution is to provide a thorough review of the research that has been conducted on candidates. We discuss the theoretical approaches developed by scholars on the subject in the first section, the main conclusions of the empirical research in the second section, the methods and data employed in candidate research in the third section, and finally some possible trajectories for future research.