Democratization versus representation? Women party leaders and party primaries in Belgium.

An increasing number of parties are recently changing its internal organisation, more in particular by giving their grassroots members a greater formal say in the selection of the party leader (Leduc, 2001; Denham, 2009 ; Kenig, 2009 ; Wauters, 2010 ; Cross and Blais, 2011) These developments vary across countries and across parties, but seem to constitute nevertheless a clear trend in Western political parties. The most inclusive way to select a party leader is organizing party primaries in which all party members can participate. This phenomenon can be studied from different angles: by either focusing on the features, the causes or the consequences of it. In this paper, we will evaluate these direct member votes by looking at one type of consequences, i.e. their impact on representation (Rahat & Hazan, 2010). As for representation, a distinction can be made between descriptive representation (or ‘representation as presence’) and substantive representation (or ‘representation of ideas’). Our focus will be on the former, and more in particular on the representation of women. The continued lack of gender equality in political leadership is named by Inglehart and Norris (2002) as one of the fundamental problems of contemporary democracies. The presence of women at the head of a party matters for several reasons: they are thought to be a support for women politicians in the candidate selection process, they could be a stronger guarantee for the consideration of women’s interests and they could function as role models for future women politicians. The focus will on Belgian parties. We will analyse whether candidacy requirements and the level of inclusiveness of the procedures to select a party leader impact on the presence of women as party leaders. In addition, we will analyse whether women candidates manage to obtain an equal number of votes compared to men in these party contests. In parliamentary elections women tend to obtain fewer votes than men (Murray et al, 2009 ; Wauters et al, 2010), it remains to be seen whether this also applies to intra-party elections. Control variables, such as party strength and the ideological position of the party (O’Neill & Stewart, 2009) will be included in our analysis.