1 WARNING: This paper is similar to the one published as Cordero, Guillermo, Xavier Coller and Antonio Jaime-Castillo (2018), “The effects of the Great Recession on candidate selection in America and Europe” in Coller, Xavier, Guillermo Cordero and Antonio M. Jaime-Castillo (eds) (2018), The Selection of Politicians in Times of Crisis, Londres: Routledge, pp: 262-77 Chapter 16. The Effects of the Great Recession on Candidate Selection in America and Europe Guillermo Cordero, Xavier Coller, Antonio M. Jaime-Castillo Despite the increasing attention paid to candidate selection by the recent literature, this subject can still be considered “the secret garden of politics” (Gallagher, 1988). There are, at least, three reasons for this. Firstly, most of the contributions on the field have analysed the formal procedures of candidate selection, forgetting the informal mechanisms behind these regulations (Ranney, 1981; Gallagher and Marsh, 1988; Hopkin 2001; Katz 2001; Fujimura, 2012; Cordero and Coller, 2015). As previous empirically oriented works have shown, there are wide gaps between the internal rules (or even country regulations) and the internal practices that lead party decisions to implement and comply with formal regulations (Cordero, Castillo and Coller, 2016). Secondly, a significant portion of the literature has focused on the selection of the candidates to prime minister or leaders of parties, forgetting how the lists for the legislative power are designed (see Sandri et al., 2015). This interest on the selection of candidates to prime minister (at the national or regional level) has dramatic consequences on the knowledge of party internal life. As we know, the composition of parliamentary groups has important consequences on MPs behaviour (Carey 2007, Gallagher and Marsh 1988; Hix 2004; Cordero and Coller, 2015), duration of governments (Siavelis & Morgenstern, 2008), relationships with citizens, and internal distribution of power (Katz & Mair, 2005) and, ultimately, the quality of democracy. The way in which these MPs are selected are the focus of analysis of this book. Thirdly, the Great Recession has intensified the crisis of trust and legitimacy of parties in many countries, in which internal party life might have been put under discussion or implementation in order to reconnect with citizens, focusing especially on the way candidates are selected. The interest of this book lays in the temporal scope of the