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Many Western parties have opened up the process of leadership selection in order to increase the party's attractiveness, but negative reactions of losers in such contests might undermine these efforts. It has extensively been documented that losers of elections or referendums become less supportive of the political system, but the question is whether such a winner-loser gap also occurs in the context of intra-party elections. We examine unique panel data collected before and after the leadership elections of the Flemish Christian-Democratic Party and Liberal-Democratic Party and investigate the difference in change in attitudes and behavior of party members who voted for the losing candidates and those who voted for the winner. Contrary to earlier research on candidate selection, we find that only decision acceptance differs between winners and losers, while there is no gap in support for the electoral process, party membership satisfaction, and members' activity within the party.

We investigate to what extent local political parties have attention for ethnic minority interests. We are interested in whether party-related or context-related variables lead to higher levels of attention to ethnic minority interests. Our analysis is based on a broad scale survey among local party chairs in Belgium. The results show that mainly party-related variables explain variance in attention for ethnic minority interests: leftist parties and active parties are more likely to defend these interests. The presence of ethnic minority people in a party does not have a significant effect once we control for factors at the municipality level.

Proportional electoral systems tend to be more beneficial for women's descriptive representation than majority systems. However, within proportional systems the gender equality of election outcomes differs, highlighting the importance of studying the actual use of electoral provisions in proportional representation (PR) systems. Therefore, we investigate the determinants of voting for female candidates in Belgium's local elections. This case is particularly interesting given the equal number of men and women on the candidate lists due to quota regulations, the possibility to cast multiple preference votes (lowering competition), and the high visibility of these local elections and its candidates. At the individual level, we find that women are more likely than men to vote for several women, yet same-sex voting is more common among men. Politically sophisticated respondents vote more often for candidates of both sexes. Against our expectations, a left-wing orientation does not increase the likelihood of voting for women. At the electoral district level, a larger supply of women at the top list position increases the chance to vote for this top woman, but there is no spillover effect to women lower on the list. District magnitude affects the number of preference votes but, against expectations, not the likelihood of voting for women.

The central concern of this article is the extent of political party commitments to the inclusion of ethnic minorities. The study of two Belgian cities and four parties shows a marked discrepancy between the efforts to include ethnic minority candidates and their level of inclusion in the local party structures as individual members, as party officials or as a party subdivision. A possible explanation is that political parties only promote the representation of ethnic minorities out of concern for their own electoral competitiveness, and not based on an unconditional commitment to the full political integration of ethnic minorities.

Worldwide, politicians devote increasing attention to the sociodemographic representativeness of political institutions. The underrepresentation of specific groups (and of women in particular) in political institutions is a democratic problem (Phillips 1995). To counter the lack of representativeness of political institutions, measures have been adopted to increase the influx of female politicians in parliaments and governments. Among others, quota regulations have been implemented in several countries in recent years (Dahlerup 2007; Krook 2007).