Gender, Institutions and Party Politics: Concepts, Theories and Future Directions

We would encourage contributions from established and early career scholars working on gender and political parties. The proposed Workshop Organisers (Kenny and Bjarnegård) are well-established mid-career scholars, who have published widely on gender and party politics and are experienced at conference and workshop organisation. They will make use of their networks to solicit contributions through existing ECPR Standing Groups on Political Parties and Gender and Politics; the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network (FIIN) which the Workshop Organisers are Co-Directors of; as well as wider comparative party projects like the Political Parties Database Project, MAPP, V-Party and others. The workshop organisers were planning on organising a panel on gender, institutions and party politics at the International Political Science Association’s conference in 2020, which was cancelled due to the pandemic. Although the panel never took place, we received a lot of interesting proposals and could use it as a way to gauge interest in the topic. We would welcome theoretically, methodologically and empirically-focused paper contributions. This includes papers that engage with and seek to gender classic and new concepts and theories in the field – including, but not limited to, papers focusing on party systems and competition; party organisation; intra-party democracy; populism; clientelism; the selection of candidates and leaders; campaigning and party finance. We also welcome papers that outline new or innovative approaches to the study of gender and party politics, including case study and ethnographic research; mixed methods research; as well as larger quantitative studies. We anticipate wide interest in the workshop, given the rapid expansion of the field of gender and party politics in recent years – evidenced, for example, in recent special issues on gender and internal party regulation (van Biezen and Rashkova 2013); party politics (Celis et al. 2016); candidate selection (Kenny and Verge 2015, 2016); political ambition (Piscopo and Kenny 2020); conservative parties (Celis and Childs 2018); women’s parties (Cowell-Meyers et al. 2020); and populist parties (Kantola and Lombardo 2020), amongst others. We particularly welcome contributions which move beyond the traditional focus of party scholarship on North America and Western Europe – including comparative work across different countries and regime types. We also welcome papers that look beyond the national level, investigating sub-national or transnational party dynamics – for example, building on the growing body of work on gender and European Parliament (EP) party groups (e.g. Kantola and Rolandsen-Agustín 2016). While the focus of the workshop is on gender, we would ask paper proposals to be attentive to both relational dynamics of gender (including masculinities), and intersectional dynamics of power. We anticipate that a key outcome of the workshop would be a tightly connected edited volume – organised around thematic chapters focused on gendering key concepts, theories and debates, whilst also drawing on new methodological approaches and empirical research. This would fill a significant gap, nearly thirty years on from Lovenduski and Norris’s foundational volume – in terms of collectively developing and taking forward a systematic and integrated approach to the study of gender, institutions and parties.