The Candidate Pool Proposition

Institutional outcomes are often analysed through the composition of visible endpoints such as professions, managerial hierarchies, courts, universities, parliaments, executive boards, occupations, organisations, or other selected populations. This working paper argues that endpoint-centred analysis frequently misidentifies the relevant unit of diagnosis. It introduces the Candidate Pool Proposition: institutional composition is generated through sequential candidate-pool formation, and candidate pools rather than endpoints or general populations alone constitute the primary diagnostic unit for understanding institutional outcomes. Candidate pools are defined as the populations that are eligible, plausible, prepared, positioned, and institutionally available for selection at a given stage of a pathway. They are analytically distinct from: general populations; eligibility pools; applicant or nominated pools; selected intermediate pools; final institutional endpoints. The paper develops a candidate-pool ontology and formalises four central processes: candidate-pool generation; candidate-pool propagation; candidate-pool transformation; candidate-pool branching. It also specifies how candidate-pool reconstruction can be used to diagnose where institutional composition changes across educational, occupational, organisational, political, professional, and elite pathways. The contribution is methodological and ontological rather than deterministic or normative. Candidate-pool analysis does not deny discrimination, exclusion, preference formation, organisational bias, unequal opportunity, social closure, or endpoint selection. Instead, it specifies where such mechanisms should be examined: at the stage where a candidate pool is generated, transformed, filtered, or selected from. The framework is applicable to research on representation, occupational segregation, recruitment, professional closure, management and elite pipelines, political representation, academic careers, social mobility, workforce planning, and institutional inequality. This working paper forms part of the Institutional Selection Framework research programme. Within that programme, Endpoint Indeterminacy defines the inferential problem, the Candidate Pool Proposition identifies the primary diagnostic unit, the Career Path Dependency Index (CPDI) measures pathway constraint, and cohort-propagation analysis examines how earlier candidate pools may appear in later institutional outcomes.