Title: Political representation at the local level: Who gets elected and why?

Authors: Jan Velimsky / Sebastian Block / Martin Gross / Dominic Nyhuis Descriptive representation is often held important because of its assumed effects on substantial representation. While we have a good sense of who gets elected in federal and state elections, we know much less about local council elections although at the local level, the bond between voter and elected is more closely compared to elections at other layers of multi-level political systems. In this paper, we ask which candidates’ descriptive characteristics impact their chances of being elected. Analyzing 30 local council elections in large German cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in the state North Rhine-Westphalia in 2014, we investigate the relationship between descriptive characteristics such as gender, age, profession, party affiliation, place of residence, and place of birth of candidates running for local elections and their likelihood of being elected. In this context, we focus not only on electoral success alone but also on shifts in the parties’ electoral lists. By applying multi-level logistic regression analysis, our results reveal that not only gender and age significantly affect candidates’ changes of being elected but also their profession and place of birth. Furthermore, we find varying patterns between different parties and municipalities.