Gendered Pathways in Local and Regional Politics

Abstract

This panel examines how gendered opportunity structures, party practices, and institutional contexts shape women’s political careers in local and regional settings. Although subnational arenas are often the entry point into politics, they remain underexplored in debates on gender, sexuality, and political careers. Bringing together cases from Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, the panel investigates the factors that structure women’s access to office, their leadership trajectories, and their political ambition on the local level. More concretely, the papers address women’s routes to senior roles in Welsh local government, gendered recruitment and political cultures in German municipalities, party selection criteria across institutional periods in Argentina, the conditional application of women’s reservations in Mumbai, gendered evaluations of candidate experience in Austrian and German state elections, and the effects of women officeholders and motivational messages on political ambition in U.S. local politics. Collectively, the contributions show that local and regional politics are sites of both persistent exclusion and meaningful opportunities to reshape gendered power relations in political careers.

Title	Details
Labyrinths to Leadership and Feminising from the Top - Women Leaders in Welsh Local Government	View Paper Details
‘Macht vor Ort’: Gendered Power and Representation in Local Politics in Schleswig-Holstein	View Paper Details
Pathbreaker or Underdog? Women’s Ambition for Local Political Office	View Paper Details
Why Do Some Women Are Selected? Gender and the Selection of Legislative Candidates at the Subnational Level. Chubut (Argentina) 1983–2019	View Paper Details
Why Some (Women) Are More Equal?: Politics of Candidate Selection among Mumbai’s Women Municipal Councillors	View Paper Details
Experience, Gender, and Electoral Payoffs: Gendered Careers of Spitzenkandidaten in Austrian and German Länder Elections	View Paper Details