Taking the Plunge: Exploring Candidacy Motivations in a Proportional Multi-Party Democracy

Why and how do people decide to run for political office? While this question is central to understanding the supply side of democratic representation, existing research remains limited by its predominant focus on American single-member district systems and its reliance on survey-based measures ill-suited to capturing the subjective meaning of the candidacy decision. This paper addresses that gap by examining the motivations of first-time candidates in Belgium. Drawing on the Goal Affordance framework (Schneider et al., 2016) as a theoretical scaffold, and adopting an abductive approach to theory-building, the study will draw on approximately sixty in-depth interviews with first-time candidates who stood in the 2024 Belgian triple elections, conducted across Flanders and Wallonia and the full spectrum of political parties. Preliminary findings, drawn from related empirical work suggest that candidacy motivations are shaped by a combination of individual goals, early exposure to politics, and relational dynamics, most notably formal recruitment by party actors, pointing to the need to (re)conceptualise political ambition as relational rather than purely individual. The study aims to produce an empirically grounded conceptual model of candidacy motivations that speaks to proportional multi-party systems beyond the contexts for which existing theory was designed.