2026 Theses Doctoral

Essays on the Political Economy of Candidate Selection

Yoon, Heewon

Candidate nomination serves as a pivotal institutional gateway of representative democracy, functioning as a primary mechanism through which parties manage internal competition, structure descriptive representation, and mediate the influence of political capital. This dissertation investigates three dimensions of the nomination stage. First, I examine the adoption of candidate selection rules in South Korea, showing that party leaders strategically choose primary elections as a conflict-management tool in high-stakes safe districts. Second, I analyze the representational consequences of nomination methods, demonstrating that primaries impose a gendered penalty on female candidates. Finally, I expand the scope to the United States, studying how local shocks to donor capacity alter the geographic composition of campaign finance and the short-term nationalization of contributions, without producing systematic downstream effects on candidate selection.

The first essay asks: When do parties adopt primary elections? Despite the advantages of internally nominating candidates, parties increasingly rely on primaries to select candidates. I argue that elites strategically use primaries as a conflict-containment tool in safe districts, where electoral safety attracts a surge of applicants. In these high-stakes environments, primaries manage intraparty competition and neutralize the threat of candidate defection. However, this reliance is asymmetrical: ruling parties use primaries significantly less than opposition parties because they can utilize government appointments to secure compliance from excluded candidates. To test this, I employ a mixed-methods research design. Using an original dataset of South Korean legislative elections from 2012 to 2024, I estimate a difference-in-differences model to demonstrate that primaries are significantly more common in safe districts, and that ruling parties rely on them less. These findings are corroborated by in-depth elite interview data, which confirm the strategic conflict-containment calculations of party leaders.

The second essay asks: How do nomination rules mediate the effects of voter bias on women’s electoral success? While gender quotas and rising political ambition have increased female legislative presence, women remain underrepresented in district-level elections. This essay demonstrates that the institutional design of nomination processes fundamentally shapes whether parties can strategically compensate for voter bias against female candidates. Drawing on South Korea’s legislative elections, I argue that primaries act as a mechanism of resource depletion for female candidates, exposing them to costly intraparty competition that limits party support. Conversely, direct nominations allow party leaders to engage in strategic compensation by recruiting highly qualified women and delivering unified endorsements that mitigate electoral bias. Exploiting within-country variation in nomination methods, I find that women perform as well as men when directly nominated by party elites, while women nominated through primaries face a substantial and distinct electoral penalty that persists even among incumbents. These findings highlight the nomination stage as a critical mechanism through which institutions interact with structural inequalities and voter bias to shape representation.

The third essay asks: How do out-of-district donations shape candidate selection? While voting is geographically bounded, campaign contributions can flow across districts, providing a channel for nonlocal donors to influence local races. This study leverages natural disasters as exogenous shocks to the local donor base, identifying a supply-side mechanism through which crises shift the geographic composition of campaign funding. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that disaster-stricken districts experience a significant increase in the share of out-of-district donations, with the effect intensifying for more severe events. However, these financial shifts do not produce systematic effects on candidate selection, as there is no measurable change in the ideology of primary winners or the composition of candidates. These findings suggest that while exogenous shocks can temporarily nationalize campaign finance, such changes are insufficient to alter downstream electoral outcomes.