New Actors, Old Practices? Candidate Selection and Recruitment Patterns in Greece

 The aim of this chapter is to offer the first account of how candidate selection mechanisms work and to detect how (and if) these mechanisms have changed in the post ‘crisis’ period, in order to test two assumptions: first, that new and old political actors are adopting more innovative and participatory modes of candidate selection. Second, to assess whether new (or not so new) methods and practices result in differences in the descriptive representation of parliamentary representatives. In particular the goal is to: a) describe to what extent new political actors emerging after the political crisis are implementing Internal Party Democracy (IDP); b) detect if and how traditionally mainstream parties are responding to trends of internal democratization; and c) study the implications of these changes (or their absence) to descriptive representation in Greece.