This article addresses political-party organization in Estonia, especially candidate selection. Its first objective is to describe the ways in which the main parties chose their candidates before the 2011 parliamentary election. A second objective is to evaluate those procedures in light of expectations generated by established theory. The focus is on two conditions: the institutional framework, particularly the electoral system, and the relative youth of Estonian democracy. The evidence confirms these expectations only partially, which suggests that an individual party’s ideological, organizational and strategic circumstances, in addition to structural and institutional conditions, are critical to understanding why it performs this basic function as it does.