Disrupting the Good Ole Boys’ Club: Leadership Change and Inclusivity in the Brazilian Workers’ Party

Two decades after the implementation of Brazil’s gender quota law, electoral and party politics remain pervasively masculine arenas. Male dominance of local party networks has hindered women’s participation, with Brazil still ranked last among Latin American nations in terms of women’s legislative representation. Those party networks have proven intransigent to external stimuli often cited as inducing party change; a reformed quota law, an electorate increasingly open to women, and examples of successful promotion of women’s participation by a few parties have all failed to incentivize party change among most of Brazil’s party organizations. This paper focuses on two other conditions capable of triggering party change – leadership change and financial incentives. It builds on research highlighting the importance of party leadership for women’s representation and the gendered reality of access to party office to demonstrate why and how leadership change paired with financial incentives can disrupt exclusionary political networks and further inclusion. The paper applies a feminist institutionalist approach to conduct a case study of leadership inclusivity in the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT), which implemented a gender parity quota for its internal party office elections in 2013. It uses process tracing and interviews with critical actors to identify the networks mobilized to usher in the parity quota, emphasizing the gendered power relations that constrain strategies to realize inclusion. It then descriptively analyzes 2014 electoral returns to examine the initial consequences of the leadership change for parliamentary representativeness. The paper compares the PT experience to that of other major Brazilian parties, and concludes that the use of quotas for internal party office incentivized by state subsidies constitutes a viable strategy for mitigating gender discrimination within parties and parliament.