Who Stands for Elected Office?: A Comparative Analysis of Local and Parliamentary Election Candidates in the UK.

Elected politicians in the UK are likely to be middle-aged white males leading to concerns that significant social groups, particularly women and those people from minority ethnic populations are under-represented. Various measures have been proposed to facilitate the recruitment and entry of such groups into national and local government. Although much is known about the people that are elected to the national parliament less is understood about other types of candidate - those that contest but lose at general elections and candidates generally that challenge for local elected office. The paper considers a pooled data set comprising two surveys of candidates that contested recent general elections and a further three surveys of local election candidates in the UK. The aim is to identify similarities and differences between candidates contesting seats at the two levels of government. If the candidates that are challenging incumbents are similar to those people they are seeking to replace then the process of changing the elected demographic is likely to be slow. The data show both similarities between incumbents and challengers but also differences between those that contest at the parliamentary and local level. Candidate attitudes towards increased representation for women are also explored in order to assess the level of support for the government's modernising agenda. The paper finds significant differences in the attitudes of parliamentary and local election candidates that may impact on the process of engineering more balanced representation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]