Legislative recruitment: using diagnostic testing to explain underrepresentation

Many legislative recruitment scholars seek to explain why women, visible minorities and other social groups are underrepresented in the world’s legislatures. Researchers in this area often use a supply and demand metaphor to frame their work, but cannot agree whether under-representation is mainly a supply- or demand-side problem. With an eye to moving this debate forward, this article offers a new approach to operationalizing supply and demand and shows how reverse-flow diagnostic testing, supply-first analysis and an improved testing regime can pinpoint when and why under-representation begins to occur in any political system. The new diagnostic approach is applied to data from a provincial election in British Columbia, Canada. The article uses the new diagnostic and BC case to demonstrate how under-representation in any political system is attributable to demand-side discrimination by gatekeepers and not an under-supply of political aspirants from any particular social group.