Abstract
Party members standing as candidates are the essence of parties since they may be treated as a proxy of active party members. They not only represent parties in public but more importantly, bring them into office and power.
Thus, I scrutinize local elections candidates who constitute the richest dataset of the running party members possible. I track more than 750,000 personally unique local elections candidates who were on a ticket in the Czech Republic between 1994 and 2018.
More than 150,000 of the candidates were party members. The first look shows that the running party members usually compose from 20 to 60 per cent of parties' members.
The average age of the party candidates often increases together with parties' ageing. During the last 25 years, the share of educated, and female running party members rose notably.
The analysis also inspects the nationalization of the running party membership. Finally, the research design allows tracking party switching between the years of local elections.