Women as Party Members: How Active are they?

Women tend to be underrepresented in parliaments and governments: the share of women is not in proportion to their share in the population (e.g. Caul, 1999 ; Matland 2005 ; Krook, 2007). Also in political parties, women are underrepresented, not only among party members (Scarrow & Gezgor, 2010 ; van Haute et al, 2013), but even more so when moving up in the party hierarchy (Cross & Pilet, 2014). Parties are, however, key players both for the numerical representation of women in parliament and government, and for the consideration of their interests (Childs & Webb, 2011; Celis et al, 2013). They fulfil a number of essential functions such as recruiting and selecting electoral candidates, informing, socialising and mobilising people, and aggregating and articulating interests (Key 1964; Gunther & Diamond 2001). By being very active in party activities, women can compensate for their limited presence among party members. An increasing number of political parties have recently been changing their internal organization, more in particular by giving grassroots members a greater formal say in the selection of the party leader, the selection of candidates and the formulation of policy proposals (e.g. Leduc, 2001; Cross & Blais, 2012; Pilet & Cross, 2014). In this paper, we will evaluate whether the gender of party members affects their propensity to participate in this kind of activities. We test two conflicting hypotheses: 1) women are more likely to participate since by overcoming participation hurdles to become member, female party members are a selected elite very motivated to participate ; 2) women are less likely to participate since the same barriers for becoming party member hinder them in participating in these party activities. We will run our analyses on a dataset from a broad-scale survey among party members in four Belgian parties (N > 3,000).