Candidates from established political families are more likely to win than their non-dynastic counterparts because their political inheritance often includes significant advantages in resources and reputation. Yet dynastic candidates also bring their own set of experiences and qualities to the game. Is it the case that their individual characteristics can explain their electoral success, or is their success due to their family legacy? Theoretically, how and when are political resources transferred to the new generation? We examine these questions by looking at non-incumbent candidates in city and county council elections in Taiwan from 2009 to 2014, drawing on unique data on politicians' backgrounds. The profile of dynastic candidates differs from that of non-dynastic candidates: they are younger, have less electoral experience and list experience in different sorts of organizations and jobs. However, these differences are not what drives their electoral success; indeed, they tend to win despite these qualities rather than because of them. Even after controlling for candidate quality, dynastic status remains a powerful predictor, conveying roughly a 20 percentage point increase in the probability of winning. This suggests that while dynastic candidates accrue some of their advantage long before they run for office, a large part of the inheritance is transferred during the campaign.

In the United States, emphasizing their families and talking about parenthood can be a potent strategy for political candidates as voters use information about a candidate’s family life to make assessments of the candidate’s personal attributes and issue competencies. We nonetheless know little about how a candidate’s race affects these assessments. We thus consider how Black women use and benefit from politicizing motherhood, and we argue that the unique intersectional identities of Black women shaped jointly by their race and gender can give Black women a stronger strategic advantage from highlighting motherhood compared to white women. Using both observational and experimental data, we apply this intersectional framework by examining motherhood messages. We identify the extent to which Black women rely on messages about motherhood and how voters respond. Our results show that Black women are just as likely to use motherhood messages relative to white women, and that Black women receive positive evaluations from voters from a message emphasizing motherhood. White and minority voters are equally likely to positively rate Black women who emphasize motherhood.

Recent increases in the number of openly LGBTQ2+ candidates have not resulted in a corresponding rise in the number of LGBTQ2+ politicians elected to the Canadian House of Commons, reviving the hypothesis of the “sacrificial lamb” candidacies. Drawing upon Lovenduski and Norris’ work on political recruitment, we analyze the backgrounds and experiences of the 172 LGBTQ2+ candidates who ran in the 2015, 2019 and 2021 federal elections in Canada. Our approach is based on the idea that LGBTQ2+ candidacies are the new sacrificial lambs of Canadian politics, although some of them seem less likely to be sacrificed than others. Indeed, we highlight how the electoral opportunities (for example, district competitiveness) afforded to LGBTQ2+ cis men are more likely to result in success than those afforded to LGBTQ2+ cis women or gender minority candidates.

Under what circumstances do central and local party actors engage in gatekeeping to influence the outcomes of local nomination races? In this article, I develop a theory of gatekeeping in Canadian parties by synthesizing past work on candidate selection with a multi-method field study of New Brunswick provincial nominations (2017–2018). I present evidence in favour of this theory from participant-observation of 25 nominating conventions, 93 elite interviews, and an original dataset of major party nominations for the 2018 New Brunswick election. The theory and evidence show how gatekeeping by central party actors helps explain how nominations can go uncontested, even in competitive and safe seats. The theory also generates several testable claims for future studies of candidate selection in other places, time periods and levels of government in Canada.

The political underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in Canadian politics is well documented. One political arena that has yet to be examined in this respect, however, is school boards. Using data from a candidate survey conducted during the course of the 2018 Ontario school board elections, as well as demographic data collected on the entire population of school board candidates, we explore the unique characteristics of school board elections. The research note begins by describing the gender and racial composition of candidates and trustees in Canada's most populous province. It then considers the ways in which school board elections may serve as a launchpad to higher office for either of these two traditionally underrepresented groups, as we explore the features of progressive political ambition, recruitment into school board campaigns and the relative electoral success of racialized candidates and women in this local office. While women do very well in school board elections, they are significantly less likely than their male counterparts to have the desire to move up to provincial or federal politics. Meanwhile, racialized candidates contest school board election in significant numbers and report similar levels of progressive ambition relative to their white counterparts, but they fare exceptionally poorly in school board elections.