Research on Violence against Women in Politics (VAWIP) has suggested that the large leaps in women’s political representation have resulted in a backlash against women as political actors. It has been claimed that women as candidates and representatives experience increasing levels of violence and intimidation. In this paper, we seek to nuance this proposition. In line with Piscopo (2016), we suggest that the context in which women enter candidate races and legislatures matters for the expected level of violence. In countries where violence and intimidation are politically normalized, all political actors - male or female - are likely to be exposed.
To examine the role of context, we analyze gendered patterns of electoral violence (broadly defined) in post-conflict Sri Lanka. We zoom in on candidates’ experiences of intimidation and violence in the 2018 local elections, nine years after the end of the 25-year-long civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the government. We have collected new survey data from approximately 200 political candidates (including winners as well as losers, and women as well as men) from around the country. As expected, we find no large differences between the extent of election violence experienced by male and female candidates in this post-conflict context. Perpetrators of violence are predominately perceived to be from other parties. The differences that can be discerned primarily concern the types of violence that men and women are victims of. Men are more likely to be the victims of degrading talk during the course of the election campaign. Women, on the other hand, are more often than men exposed to different forms of intimidation of a sexual nature. To conclude, although election violence is here interpreted as a legacy of the violent conflict, it is clear that even such normalized violence is carried out according to gendered scripts.
