LAUSR

ences. List proposals are therefore designed to achieve a balance of local interests for parliamentary representation. While these findings are intriguing by themselves and great detail is devoted to portraying individual actors’ considerations, the book does little in offering explanations that could be generalised and that may be traced back to assumptions on the behaviour of political actors. This also relates to political subdivisions and factions: Though intra-party groupings are frequently mentioned when describing particular decisions, the book provides little guidance when it comes to assessing how important these divisions are for the process of candidate selection. Unfortunately, the analysis also seems somewhat repetitive. Whereas chapters 3 and 4 provide accounts of the nominal and list tier candidate selection, the chapter on ‘who decides’ (chapter 5) seems to present largely similar conclusions in a different structure. Lastly, Steg empirically considers the impact of candidate selection on descriptive and substantial parliamentary representation in terms of gender, age and migration background. In this chapter, the author uses his sample in a descriptive-quantitative manner to evaluate how candidate selection procedures ‘filter out’ certain candidates. Again, the author’s answers hinge on the qualitative evaluation of the small numbers (especially with regard to migration background). The conclusion to this end is that candidate selection slightly improves the representation of women, whereas otherwise the selected candidates largely mirror the pool of potential candidates. For scholars interested in the candidate nomination procedures within German parties, the book gives an impression of how the party on the ground interacts with the party in public office and, in particular, provides a practitioner’s perspective on the organisational and strategic aspects of political careers. As such, it would be interesting to link the author’s focus on the balancing of local interests to the existing research that has focused on diverging policy positions within parties and the role such intra-party dissent plays in, for example, legislative voting and coalition bargaining.