When Women Run and Campaign, Do They Win?

The fact that women are still largely underrepresented in politics is undisputed. However, the reasons behind this are not so clear anymore. For a long time, women have been discriminated at all stages of the legislative recruitment process. Whether discrimination is still that systematic is unclear today: empirical evidence is limited and findings on where discrimination takes place vary. We explore systematically the discrimination of women in legislative recruitment using data from candidate surveys from Switzerland from 2007 and 2011 in the framework of the comparative candidate survey (CCS) project where more than 3400 out of 7500 candidates participated in the two surveys. Switzerland’s open list PR electoral system is very favourable to study the causes and the impact of candidate gender on electoral success because in order to get elected in one of the 200 seats, candidates have to get more preference votes than the competitors from their own party. We find significant gender differences in campaign spending, that women focus their campaign more often to benefit the party instead of their own candidature and they less often hold positions in party or political offices at the lower level which could support their efforts to mobilise voters. However, women nevertheless do not worse at the polls than men. Once we take into account incumbent advantage, the ratio of elected women is about the ratio of the female candidates. Women also do not get fewer preference votes than men. Given that there is no shortage of female candidates on all lists in Switzerland, this lets us conclude, that the main source of underrepresentation is not so much discrimination by parties or voters anymore but the overall lower level of political involvement of women in politics especially among centre and right wing parties.