Discussions around electability are central in election campaigns, often targeting minority candidates. This paper examines two related questions: Why do electability concerns strongly affect minority candidates? How can we contrast such concerns? Focusing on voters’ perspective, I argue that three main factors fuel electability concerns, including perceptions of lack of electoral support for minority candidates, voters’ own prejudice, and the scarcity of successful examples of minority candidates.

Women remain significantly underrepresented in positions of power and have limited access to the most prestigious policy areas. Drawing on the political economy of committee assignments, several theoretical approaches could explain why gendered patterns in access to political offices persist. We assess the most prominent theories using unique fine-grained data on members of German state parliaments from 1948 to 2016 and introduce several measures of committee prestige.

(book project with Spencer Goidel, Auburn University and Paul M. Kellstedt, Texas A&M)

Tycho van der Hoog is an Assistant Professor of International Security Studies at the Netherlands Defence Academy. He completed a PhD at the African Studies Centre of Leiden University on the relations between North Korea and African revolutionaries. The resulting book, Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa, was published by Hurst and Oxford University Press in 2025. Over the course of ten years, Tycho has conducted extensive archival research in repositories across four continents, including multiple countries in Africa.

Dr Johann Schmid is a Project officer for the subject of Hybrid Warfare at the Bundeswehr Centre of Military History and Social Sciences (ZMSBw), Potsdam and lecturer at the University of Potsdam. Previously he was the Director COI Strategy & Defence at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Helsinki. He joined the Bundeswehr in 1989. His assignments within the mechanized infantry, latest as company commander, included deployment to Kosovo in 1999.