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 candidate re-selection in Sub-Saharan African legislatures? Legislative turnover in the region occurs primarily at the intra-party selection stage rather than at the ballot. However, research consistently overlooks how this process disproportionately affects women incumbents relative to their male counterparts. Drawing on principal-agent theory and feminist institutionalism, this study examines whether women's issue advocacy constitutes political capital that enhances women MPs' standing with party selectors, or whether it functions as a liability by marking incumbents as overly particularistic in party-dominated systems. By analysing Hansard records from Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Lesotho, and Zambia, the study employs dictionary-based and quantitative text analysis to measure women's issue advocacy in parliamentary speeches. The analysis estimates a multilevel logistic regression model of candidate re-selection, with observations clustered at the party and country levels to account for contextual dependencies. The model incorporates party-level covariates (including mode of candidate selection, party seat share, and party ideological orientation) alongside institutional variables such as electoral system, quota adoption, and party institutionalization. It also includes MP-level controls such as tenure and committee membership. The integration of principal-agent and feminist institutionalist frameworks offers new evidence on how gendered representation interacts with party gatekeeping to shape candidate selection in Sub-Saharan African democracies.