Speaking for Women, Competing for Selection: Legislative Advocacy and Candidate Re-Selection in Sub-Saharan African Legislatures

How does women incumbents’ legislative advocacy for issues disproportionately affecting women impact their prospects of being re-selected in Sub-Saharan Africa? Legislative turnover in the region has been shown to be largely an intra-party problem rather than a rejection-at-the-ballot one. On average, less than half of parliamentarians are returned to parliament after each election, and about 60 percent of this turnover occurs during the intra-party selection phase. Levels of party institutionalization, modes of intra-party candidate selection, patronage or clientelistic politics, degrees of democracy, and even electoral systems have been blamed for this phenomenon in the region. What is, however, often underreported is how it disproportionately affects women compared to their male counterparts. This implies that at every election, there are relatively fewer experienced women incumbents available to advocate for women’s issues. What is yet opened to investigation is knowing if the tendency of women incumbents to be more particularistic further limit their chances of being re-selected by their parties. This paper therefore investigates whether legislative advocacy for women’s issues shapes women MPs’ prospects of candidate re-selection in Sub-Saharan Africa. By analysing Hansard records from five national parliaments, the study examines how engaging in substantive representation (through speeches addressing women’s concerns) affects women MPs’ political survival within their parties. The study engages dictionary-based and quantitative text analysis to measure women’s issue advocacy, offering new evidence on the link between legislative behaviour, representation, and candidate selection in Sub-Saharan African democracies. A multilevel Cox proportional hazards model will be used to estimate MPs’ nomination survival, accounting for clustering at the party and country levels. Institutional variables such as electoral system, quota adoption, party institutionalization among others will be included as covariates and moderators.