Replication Data for: Gender, Incumbency, and Party List Nominations

We study how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, we ask what determines whether parties place women candidates in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, we directly examine a mechanism—party nomination—central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover, we jointly evaluate how incumbency and gender affect nomination. We use European Parliament elections to compare a plethora of parties, operating under numerous institutions, in the context of a single legislature. We find that gender differences in candidate selection are largely explained by incumbency bias, although party ideology and female labor force participation help to explain which parties prioritize the placement of novice women candidates.