Electoral Lists and Parliamentary Profiles in Spain and Germany

Abstract

Electoral lists are a key element in electoral systems, particularly because of their implications for the functioning of democracy. However, it is not usual to find studies on how these attributes may be related to the type of candidates included in the electoral lists. We start with an overview of the different types of lists and we portray the cases of Spain and Germany - two different systems in both their formal and informal rules. After that, we use the comparative data of a transnational European survey to see the differences in the profiles of the parliamentarians in the lower houses of both countries. We firstly expected that a more open list system —the German case— would be more inclusive in terms of selection, which was confirmed. We also expected our close-list system in Spain to be more inclusive in parliamentary profiles, and this was the case only for gender, while in terms of age and educational levels and profiles was not. These results allow new inquiries to further research on the relationship between formal and informal factors of candidate selection and demographic representation profiles.