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I am grateful for feedback on an earlier draft of this paper provided at the 2015 European Conference on Politics and Gender, Uppsala University and the 2015 CPSA Finding Feminisms roundtable, University of Ottawa. I am also grateful for the feedback provided by the CJPS's reviewers, and Joni Lovenduski, Rosie Campbell, and Kennedy Stewart. Lastly, I thank the many Labour party officials and aspirants for their participation in this study.
Introduction
Women have never held more than 25 per cent of the world's total legislative seats and no national legislature of any established liberal democracy has ever achieved sex parity.1Scholars agree women win disproportionally fewer seats because they secure fewer candidacies for political parties than men (Kenny and Verge, 2016: 351; Lovenduski, 2005). However, there is no consensus as to whether women's underrepresentation in political party candidate pools is due to a lack of supply of women aspirants seeking candidacy or a lack of demand for women aspirants among party selectors (Ashe, 2015). This study offers an unobstructed glimpse into the "secret garden of politics" (Gallagher and Marsh, 1988) using rare data on 4,622 British Labour party aspirant candidates participating in three general elections to illustrate a refined multistage method for exploring candidate supply and demand and sex underrepresentation in party candidate pools. The study examines the extent to which aspirant candidates enter and exit each of Labour's seven selection process stages, whether women are disproportionally filtered and, if found to be so, whether disproportional filtering is due to supply- or demand-side factors. Test results reveal demand-side factors hinder women from obtaining their fair share of candidacies far more than supply-side factors and bolster calls to expand demand-side solutions such as sex quotas for women.
Women's Legislative Underrepresentation, Candidate Selection and Supply and Demand
Descriptive representation, the degree to which elected bodies reflect the populations from which they are drawn, is a key normative premise by which scholars evaluate legislatures by suggesting selective descriptive characteristics such as the sex, race and ethnicity of legislators is central to understanding legislative policy choice (Mansbridge, 2009). Scholars also connect descriptive underrepresentation to political legitimacy, electoral success and justice, with Phillips arguing there is "no argument from justice that can defend the current state of affairs: and...