Classical models of party competition in ethnically divided societies (Rabushka and Shepsle, 1971; Horowitz, 1985) describe an inescapable trap by which parties are compelled to radicalize their positions on ethnic issues in order to "outbid" intra-ethnic competitors. However, more recent studies have challenged this fatalistic perspective, suggesting that parties may be incentivized to adopt moderate positions and reach across ethnic communities when they are faced with complex structures of cross-cutting ethnic identities and social cleavages (Chandra, 2005; Coakley, 2008) when they act as office-seekers (Zuber, 2013), or when they desire to enhance their valence appeal by appearing as effective dealmakers (Mitchell et al., 2009). This paper contributes to the research on ethnic outbidding by addressing an underexplored dimension of electoral competition in divided societies: the descriptive representation of different ethnic communities. To this end, the paper examines candidate selection at the local level in two cases—Catalonia and the Basque Country from 1987 to 2023—which present a significant variation in the local party systems and in the strategies adopted by regional and state-wide parties. Leveraging the discontinuities introduced by effective electoral thresholds in municipal elections, I estimate the causal effect of the entry of new intra-ethnic competitors on the composition of local party lists.