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How does biased political recruitment—and the legislation of gender quotas—affect the quality of representation? The article theorizes that biased selection implies a higher hurdle for women than for men. As a consequence, fewer—but more talented and ambitious—female legislators enter office. When quotas are legislated, the bias lingers but takes new forms. Uncertain about their initial choice, parties compensate by drawing on incumbent women's legislative record to update their beliefs. Quota women are thus more accountable. Drawing on a "before-after" design with a control group, this study investigates legislators' effort, performance, ambition, and reselection to the European Parliament (1999–2014). It demonstrates that non-quota women handled more high-impact legislation and aimed at longer careers than other legislators. When quotas were imposed, the share of women did not increase. However, quota women had a higher pay off from performing well in office and reacted by increasing their effort.

I consider how asymmetric information between the party selectorate and members of Parliament affects the renomination of incumbent candidates. By applying an adverse selection model, I argue that the selectorate looks to past performance to select candidates it expects will gain influence. However, the impact of performance varies according to the need for and availability of information. The European Parliament (EP) provides a most-likely case for information asymmetry. Studying three elections in 11 member states, I find that the allocation of influential positions in office improves chances of reselection. The effect increases when the allocation is more selective, and when the prior uncertainty around candidacies is high. The study thus proposes a new approach to the relationship between national parties and transnational groups in the EP. It also suggests venues for research on parliamentary politics and candidate selection in general.

Judicial appointments allow selectors to advance policy goals by appointing influential judges who share their ideological preferences. Under renewable terms, information from judicial records becomes crucial for identifying desirable candidates. While prior research has focused on judicial voting, we examine how expectations about judges' influence on case law shape reappointments. Using original data on all potential reappointments to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), we show that governments select judges based on both ideology and potential impact. Secret voting -- intended to safeguard judicial independence -- fails to shield judges from ideological deselection. However, reappointment levels remain high because governments recognize the need to translate preferences into policies. Peer selection to influential court positions thus favors the reappointment of high-performing judges, while non-selective processes do not. Our findings challenge the belief that renewable terms weaken judicial independence, showing that selectors indirectly rely on peer evaluations for reappointments.

Parliamentarians receive public funding to employ local staff in the constituency. Local staff help members of parliament to execute their representative duties, but can also become an electoral asset. Drawing on theories of personal vote-seeking we study local staff as an example of constituency service. Modelling within-individual changes in local staff size among 1174 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), we find that the number of local staff increases before both European and national elections, and more so in candidate-centred than party-centred systems. Despite a single European Parliament (EP) staff system, EU citizens are represented differently depending on where they elect their members and the electoral system that applies. Attempts to mend the EU's democratic deficit by strengthening MEPs' contacts with citizens through local staff potentially means that European public money is used to fund EP incumbents' electoral campaigns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the democratic functioning of the European multi-level system.

We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, candidate, member of parliament) and join them with external information. Currently, the data cover four elections (1999–2014). Among other aspects, the collection should facilitate research on the European Parliament's allegedly weak electoral connection. In this article, we outline the main features of the datasets, describe patterns of intra-party competition and preference voting and conduct exploratory analyses of individual-level changes in list positions.