Do gender quotas make a difference for who gets asked to run for elective office? Evidence from Germany.

This paper investigates whether the presence of gender quotas makes political parties likely to ask their female members to run for elective office. Based on an original mail survey of over 1000 local party leaders in Germany, this paper finds that female members in German parties are no less likely than male members to have been asked by their parties to run for elective office. Furthermore, this result is also observed in political parties without gender quotas and in and places where state and local electoral systems are not compatible with the use of quotas, indicating that, in this case, quotas have a contagion effect. They have created a normative expectation that parties nominate female candidates even in instances when there is no official quota in place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]