Patterns of Gendered Voting in Single Member District Systems: Evidence from the UK, 1991-2017

The underrepresentation of women in politics – and in particular in parliaments – remains one of the biggest challenges to equal representation in Western Democracies. While most legislatures still fall short of gender parity, numbers of female candidates and MPs have increased in recent decades. The underlying mechanisms, however, remain unclear: To what extent have parties’ nomination strategies and to what extent have voters’ choices at the ballot box driven these developments? To study this question in the context of single member district systems, we leverage a novel longitudinal data set that combines information on all candidates in UK parliamentary elections since 1987 with newly geo-coded panel survey data from the BHPS/UKHLS. This allows us to trace changes in parties’ nomination strategies and voters’ reactions to female candidates over time. In particular, we can establish if parties favored male candidates in promising electoral races, if voters disproportionately favored male over female candidates, and how the magnitude of both potential biases evolved over time. Our findings yield important implications at the intersection of representation, voting behavior, intra-party dynamics, and electoral instutions.