Political selection is crucial to the quality of governance. Yet our general knowledge of the individual characteristics that correlate with the political selection process is scant. Our paper contributes to this knowledge gap by collecting detailed data on the quality, perceptions, attitudes, and promises of all candidates involved in a recent local election in rural Uganda. Our context is unique -with two separate governing bodies for males and females. The paper demonstrates, that male and

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... male political selection into these two parallel institutions share important similarities but also differ along several dimensions. We are very thankful to the EDI Programme for the funding to collect the data for this project and to Frances Nsonzi for supervising and implementing the data collection in the field. We are also very grateful to Merve Demirel and Artur Obminski for excellent Research Assistance. About Economic Development & Institutions Institutions matter for growth and inclusive development. But despite increasing awareness of the importance of institutions on economic outcomes, there is little evidence on how positive institutional change can be achieved. The Economic Development and Institutions -EDIresearch programme aims to fill this knowledge gap by working with some of the finest economic thinkers and social scientists across the globe. The programme was launched in 2015 and will run until March 2022. It is made up of four parallel research activities: path-finding papers, institutional diagnostic, coordinated randomised control trials, and case studies. The programme is funded with UK aid from the UK government. For more information see http://edi.opml.co.uk.