Gendered political recruitment 2.0: expanding the methodological and empirical frontiers

Abstract

Thanks to decades of feminist political recruitment research, we know that we should not look past political parties if we are to understand why most of the world’s parliaments still do not mirror the populations they represent. Owing to their control of candidate recruitment, political parties are the main gatekeepers to elected office across electoral systems. Extant research finds that many of the documented gendered outcomes that characterize political arenas across the world can be traced back to candidate recruitment, which is gendered in multiple ways. This panel brings together contributions that evaluate the effectiveness of existing policies aimed at de-gendering the candidate recruitment process through novel empirical and/or methodological lenses. One way to reform the candidate selection process is to widen the pool of actors who are responsible for selecting candidates. In some proportional-representation (PR) systems, party members play an increasingly important role in the candidate selection process. Looking at the case of the Netherlands and using a conjoint experiment, Rozemarijn van Dijk will explore whether this new ‘recruiter’ – at least as far as PR settings are concerned, can produce candidate lists that are more representative of the population. In some cases, reforming gendered institutions in political parties is considered to be ‘too little, too late’ and the creation of new parties is deemed to be necessary to make the political arena less gendered. Lisa Vickers will take a look at one such party, the Women’s Equality Party in the UK. With the help of original interview data and direct observations, Lisa examines whether the organization of women’s political parties has potential for ‘doing politics’ differently. An increasingly popular way of battling the gendered nature of political recruitment are gender quotas. This form of affirmative action has been implemented in more than 140 countries. This panel introduces novel ways of investigating the effect different types of candidate quotas have on who gets selected. Michal Smrek examines the internal party goals – written or informal, concerning diversity within the candidate pool produce the desired outcome with the help of Swedish population data. Sandra Brunsbach studies whether the implementation of gender quotas at the local level by the German Green Party can foster gender equality in local politics. Finally, party recruitment is situated in structural arrangements, such as district magnitude – that is, the seats assigned to each district. Using longitudinal analysis of an original dataset of about 120,000 candidates at Italian general elections, Marta Regalia tries to understand, first, if the correlation between district magnitude and gender representation is genuine and, second, why comparative research almost univocally identifies SMDs as an obstacle to gender representation. Analysing the differential probabilities of election by women and men, their paper will show that SMDs are not as unfavourable to women representation as they are thought to be.

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