Party feminisation: A multi-level approach

Gendered accounts of political parties emphasise that a feminised party must – at its core – integrate women into its structures, and address women’s policy concerns, acknowledging that the latter are complex and contested. Party responses to the ‘twin dimensions’ of feminisation – women’s descriptive presence and the substantive representation of women’s interests – are shaped by external pressures and factors (including electoral and party system dynamics) as well as intra-party rules and norms (including party organisation and ideology). Yet the literature on party feminisation has often been imbued by a methodological nationalism, focused on parties as unified actors at the level of the nation-state, and often ignoring or underplaying more complex and multi-level dynamics of party organisation and change. This is increasingly important in a wider context where decentralisation continues to shape the politics of multi-national and multi-ethnic countries around the world. This paper makes the case for investigating dynamics of party feminisation within parties across multiple political levels, as well as across party systems (cf. Kenny and Mackay 2014; Belknap and Kenny forthcoming). Deploying a multi-level party framework, it looks at both intra- and inter-party dynamics of descriptive and substantive feminisation in British politics, which has undergone considerable constitutional and institutional restructuring in recent decades. The paper concludes by evaluating the opportunities and barriers for promoting women’s descriptive and substantive representation in complex multi-level systems, and points to future directions for researching the multi-level dynamics of party organisation and change.