Gendered Vulnerabilities: Perceptions of Political Violence among Mexican Politicians

Recent debates on the interrelationship between gender, politics, and violence tackle a key question: do women politicians face violence because aggressors are seeking to keep women subordinate (violence against women in politics), or do women face the same political violence as men, albeit with some differences in forms (gendered political violence)? Answering this question becomes particularly difficult in national contexts where political violence is already commonplace due to legacies of conflict and instability. Mexico offers one such context. On the one hand, longstanding violence from organized crime affects Mexico’s election security, with 102 candidates murdered during the 2021 election cycle—only 15 of whom were women. On the other hand, the country’s strict gender parity rules have led to unprecedented numbers of women running for federal, state, and local office, which in turn has drawn attention to the gendered aggressions and assaults that women face on the campaign trial and in office. To disentangle the potential overlap between violence against women in politics from gendered political violence, we draw on data from two surveys of Mexican politicians: a pilot fielded to women who served as federal deputy or municipal councilor in 2020 (n=20), and one to all candidates (women and men) who ran for federal deputy in June 2021 (n=141). In both surveys, women respondents believe that women politicians are more threatened and more unsafe than men, with large majorities perceiving that women are attacked because of their gender. Yet in the main survey, we find few systematic differences in the forms of attacks experienced by women and men: for instance, women candidates and men candidates are equally likely to say they receive threats and equally likely to report receiving offensive comments related to gender on social media. Moreover, women and men do not differ in their identifications of perpetrators: both women and men blame members of rival parties, followed by members of their own party. These results suggest that political violence in Mexico affects both men and women in similar ways, but that women understand their experiences differently. Even absent gendered patterns in forms of attack or configurations of perpetrators, women perceive themselves as (potential) victims of violence against women in politics, rather than victims of ‘just’ political violence. To understand women’s perceptions, we draw on Bardall, Bjanegård and Piscopo’s concept of political violence’s gendered impacts: that the meaning politicians (and other stakeholders and community members) ascribe to their experiences is analytically distinct from—but as important as—the motivations of perpetrators. Our results suggest that since Mexican women politicians see their vulnerabilities as gendered, ending political violence solely by addressing organized crime and aggressive behavior among party members may be insufficient to ease women’s insecurity. Instead, policymakers may need to tackle the systems of patriarchal privilege that contribute to women’s insecurity, even if these systems themselves are not (always) driving the actual violence