PhD Review: From Ambition to Admission: The Recruitment of Women in Politics

Abstract

Candidate selection – the process through which political parties choose individuals to represent the party’s banner in elections – has received lively scholarly attention since Gallagher and Marsh (1988) famously described it as party politics’ “secret garden”. Candidate selection is essential to understanding democratic politics: It reveals how political parties operate internally and serves as a critical bottleneck shaping who is represented, how legislators act, and how well governments govern. The PhD dissertation by Rozemarijn van Dijk, From Ambition to Admission: The Recruitment of Women in Politics (2025), represents an important contribution to our understanding of candidate selection processes in the Netherlands, where political parties are key gatekeepers to elected office. Taking a gender perspective and drawing on the supply-and-demand framework developed by Norris and Lovenduski (1995), the dissertation traces the path to elected office from the aspirant to the candidate level, with the aim to account for women’s continued political underrepresentation in Dutch politics.