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 a major cause of women’s underrepresentation is not well established: empirical evidence is limited and findings on where in the process of gaining elective office discrimination takes place vary. We explore systematically discrimination of women in legislative recruitment using data from candidate surveys from Switzerland 2015 in the framework of the comparative candidate survey (CCS) project including more than 1600 candidates. Also, we analyse the distribution of preference votes in order to test the hypothesis of voter discrimination in real elections. Switzerland’s free list PR electoral system is very favourable to conducting such an analysis because voters have the option to allocate not only positive but also negative preference votes to candidates by crossing them off the ballot. We find significant gender differences in campaign activities: 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. As for the hypothesis of voter discrimination, we do not find strong evidence that it has an impact (either positive or negative) on women’s underrepresentation in the Swiss Parliament. This leads us to 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.