Fostering Equality: Unraveling Intra-Party Democracy's Influence on Women's Leadership in European Political Parties

The scholarly work on party politics and political representation has extensively argued about the intricate dilemma confronting political parties in reconciling two of their pivotal objectives: expanding the inclusivity of their membership to foster participation and ensuring the representation of various demographic groups within the party structure, as proposed by Rahat et al. (2008). To empirically disentangle this dilemma, this research aims to quantitatively examine the impact of the inclusiveness of party members' participation on the representation of historically marginalized political groups, particularly women. Therefore, this study aims to provide a more nuanced perspective on understanding the effects of the democratization of political parties while contributing notably to the underexplored gendered perspective in Intra-Party Democracy (IPD) literature. It seeks to answer the question: How does the inclusiveness of party members in leadership selection affect the likelihood of women running for and being chosen as party leaders and members of the National Executive Committees (NECs)? The study argues that a more inclusive leadership selection method may decrease the likelihood of women being selected as leaders compared to men, while concurrently increasing the likelihood of women running for leadership positions. Employing a comparative analysis across a substantial number of parties with varying selection rules in European parliamentary democracies, it utilizes IPD quantifications from the Political Party Database (PPDB), incorporating data on the number of women selected and running as party leaders and NEC members. The study employs advanced statistical multivariate analyses to empirically assess the effect of the inclusiveness of members' participation in leadership selection on the descriptive representation of women within a party context. This research aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the internal dynamics of political parties, the challenges of representation, and the functioning of our democracies.