The implementation of equality-based candidate selection decisions in the British Labour and Conservative parties

We explore resistance to the implementation of gender quotas in the UK. UK parties are barely regulated. Compared with their European counterparts, UK parties receive little state funding, they rely on members for funding and for campaigning. and they are dependent on unpaid party members for the implementation of many aspects of political recruitment. There are currently no legislative electoral gender quotas in the UK and parties devise their own recruitment policies and procedures. As volunteers, party members must in some measure agree to the policies they are asked to implement. Norms, practices, and behaviour develop around the processes and may support but also undermine or limit the effect of any general equality rule or aim (Bjarnegard and Kenny 2016). Institutional blockages are also formidable. Demands for party decentralization and greater intra-party democracy sometimes work against the increased representation of women (Childs 2013b). Reforms that might reduce member influence face considerable resistance. Thus, there are sizable barriers to the successful implementation of party level gender quotas in the UK. Despite these the Labour party has employed quotas, in the form of all women shortlists since the 1997 parliamentary election and the Conservative party has deployed measures, that fall short of quotas, but have gradually increased the representation of women among their elected politicians since, at least, 2005. We trace the implementation of these policies in the 2015 election in terms of outputs and outcomes and find evidence of both rowback and genuine gender transformation