Balancing and Ranking: An exploratory study on party lists in the Netherlands

This paper is an exploratory, broad and novel study on party lists in the Nether- lands and aims to empirically assess how balanced party lists in the Netherlands have been in terms of gender, ethnicity, seniority, educational backgrounds and ge- ography during the elections of 2003 to 2012. Next, an extensive dataset was created to study the determinants of party list rankings. The main ndings are that party lists are not as balanced as the empirical literature would suggest and that legisla- tive eort has no robust eect on party list positions. Seniority of candidates is positively associated with higher party list positions, but popularity is aected by the ranking rather than the reverse. However, more empirical research is required to uncover the true determinants of party list positions of Dutch political parties.