THE GENDER ELECTION GAP: WHY WOMEN’S UNDERREPRESENTATION PERSISTS IN FRANCE AND GERMANY

Much of the comparative literature on women’s descriptive representation explains the underrepresentation of women with differences in electoral systems and gender quotas. We advance this scholarship and provide new evidence by comparing female candidacies and their electoral success in two established democracies over a long period of time. We build on established findings from the comparative politics literature: party discrimination and partisan differences (2), nomination in unsafe districts, (3) incumbency advantage which benefits male candidates, (4) advantage of PR systems with closed lists over majoritarian systems. We construct an original comparative dataset for France and Germany comprising all individual candidates and their electoral success in national elections between 1980-2017. We find a gender election gap in both Germany and France that persists even after controlling for nomination bias and incumbency advantage. This gender gap varies over time and across parties. Women candidates for conservative parties are significantly less likely to be elected in both countries. New women candidates benefit to a lesser degree compared to men, if a mandate was won by a fellow party member in the previous election. We conclude that much of the established findings in the comparative scholarship on women’s descriptive representation do not hold.