Who are the Black Republicans running for Congress in 2022? Our research provides a systematic analysis of Black Republican candidates running for the U.S. House of Representatives compared to their Democratic challengers and a matched sample of 2022 White Republican candidates. Using candidate profiles and content analysis of campaign websites our analysis tests several hypotheses, including Dougan’s (2020) racial distancing, theory, Johnson’s (2022) social movement theory and Rigour’s (2015) theory of opportunity.

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Since populism research has focused on the voter-side and is no longer primarily concerned with the party-level, we know that populist views also exist among voters and influence their political beliefs and actions to a decisive degree. However, this field of research is still quite young. It is therefore not yet clear how static or context-dependent populist views are or what factors determine the formation of populist beliefs among voters. Moreover, there are hardly any surveys on populist views that go back further than the last five years, which presents a challenge to research on populism and democracy. To assess how susceptible societies are to populism at a given point in time and understand what drives populist citizens, it is crucial to understand where they came from in the first place.

Against this background, we discuss the most common explanations for populist views — grievance perception (a), discontent with political representation (b), and individual(-psychological) dispositions and socio-demographic traits (c) — and examine their explanatory power using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study from 2009 to 2017 (N = 12,490). Drawing on socio-demographic characteristics and indicators related to each of these three competing approaches, we then seek to predict populist attitudes among individuals. Following a Machine Learning approach, we split the 2017 round into training and test set before applying our trained model to ‘unseen data’, namely the GLES rounds of 2009 and 2013. We assess the validity of our prediction and the effect of predicted populism scores on political behavior and voting decisions and discuss our findings in light of the state of research on populist attitudes.

Men’s dominance in chief executive positions is a worldwide and well-documented phenomenon. Research analyzing the factors that continue to shape women’s underrepresentation in these positions is constraint by the relatively few top national executive positions. To overcome these limitations, this article answers the following research question: which factors influence women’s nomination as candidates for chief executive positions? I argue that smaller parties are more likely to select women than larger parties since for these parties a relative unsuccessful nomination is less costly because of their lower chances to win the election in the first place. Furthermore, I expect that these nominations have a positive spillover effect and motivate other parties to also select a woman candidate in the subsequent election. I test these arguments based on original data of all chief executive candidates at the regional level in Germany and Austria since 2000 and demonstrate that smaller parties are indeed more likely to field women candidates. However, I do not find empirical support for the expected spillover effect. Overall, the results of this study imply that gatekeepers’ preferences for men candidates reinforce inequalities in political institutions and underline the importance of demand side explanations for women’s underrepresentation in the executive branch.