Gendered Vulnerabilities: Parties as Perpetrators of Political Violence in Mexico

Political parties are the gatekeepers to elected office. A long line of gender and politics research has identified the formal and informal practices through which party elites resist extending electoral opportunities to women. A more recent turn in the gender and politics literature has been to characterize such resistance as gendered political violence (or violence against women in politics). Yet this turn has raised additional questions, namely, are all harassment or attacks against women politicians due to their gender? Answering this question becomes particularly difficult in contexts where political violence is regularized. In such places, political actors may see verbal, physical, and sexual violence as just “the way things are done around here.” This paper explores the nexus between party politics, gender, and political violence in Mexico, where electoral violence is indeed commonplace. For example, 102 candidates were murdered during the 2021 election cycle—and only 15 of them were women. At the same time, unprecedented numbers of women are running for federal, state, and local office thanks to strict gender parity rules. Party leaders continue to resist parity’s implementation, with women candidates routinely suing parties for noncompliance. To better understand who commits political violence in Mexico and why, we conducted two surveys: a pilot fielded in 2020 to women candidates (n=20), and a main survey to all women and men who ran for the federal congress in June 2021 (n=239). 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. Most importantly, women and men identify the same perpetrators: the political parties. While popular perceptions blame election violence on organized crime, women and men candidates alike blame members of rival parties, followed by members of their own party. They further report that parties fail to provide protection from violence and abuse. These results suggest that political parties are indeed aggressors, and that party actors use violence to intimidate opponents both insider and outside their party. Women and men seem to be affected the same—but women understand their experiences differently. Even absent gendered patterns in forms of attack or configurations of perpetrators, women perceive themselves as victims of political violence for gendered reasons. Our results have two implications. First, political parties’ ways of influencing candidate selection and electoral competition include behaviors considered violent, including harassment and physical attacks. Second, even if certain violent acts are “how things are doing around here,” ending parties’ aggressive behavior may be insufficient to ease women’s insecurity. Policymakers and parties still need to unravel the systems of patriarchal privilege that lead women to perceive political violence in gendered terms.