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Research on the impact of gender quotas in open-list proportional representation systems has described quotas as ineffective or even paradoxical. While some authors argue that gender quotas without a placement mandate will be essentially ineffective since most women will be nominated to unpromising positions, others suppose that women will be disadvantaged by gender quotas because the increase in the number of female candidates will decrease the average number of preferential votes cast for women. We reexamine the evidence for these claims by analyzing the case of Poland. We demonstrate that the gender quota introduced there in 2011 increased the number of women placed at promising ballot positions and had very little impact on the number of preferential votes cast for women. Additionally, using simulations, we show that the quota had a positive impact on the number of elected women.

This study applies black box scaling to the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey 2013 to shed light on an emerging right-wing party in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The scaling procedure extracts two meaningful and robust ideological dimensions described as socialism versus liberalism and libertarian versus authoritarian. Placing the ideal point of candidates from all parties into this two-dimensional space shows that AfD candidates are significantly more market liberal than Christian Democratic Union candidates but not more authoritarian. On these grounds, the AfD can hardly be regarded as a right-wing extremist party. Yet exploring ideological heterogeneity within parties indicates that East German AfD candidates are generally more authoritarian than their West German colleagues, highlighting a potential source of the party’s recent shift from primarily Eurosceptic toward more nationalist conservative positions.

In a recent contribution to Party Politics, Kostadinova and Mikulska analyze women's political representation by populist parties in Poland and Bulgaria. The presented findings for Poland suggest that the main right-wing populist party PiS (1) elected more women to parliament, (2) nominated more women to promising ballot positions, and (3) that voters of PiS were more likely to support women in the elections compared to leftists parties. We disagree with all three findings. While the first finding is due to an error in the descriptive statistics, we argue that the other two findings are the result of an inappropriate research design. We replicate the analysis based on an altered research design and show that PiS did not elect more women to parliament, did not nominate more women to promising ballot positions and that voters of PiS were not more likely to vote for female candidates.