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

How does the legislative advocacy of women incumbents on issues that disproportionately affect women shape their prospects of candidate re-selection in Sub-Saharan African legislatures? Legislative turnover in the region occurs primarily at the intra-party selection phase rather than at the ballot. However, existing research largely overlooks how these selection processes affect women incumbents differently from their male counterparts. Drawing on principal-agent theory and feminist institutionalism, this study examines whether women’s issue advocacy constitutes political capital that strengthens women MPs’ standing with party selectors, or whether it functions as a liability by marking incumbents as overly particularistic in party-dominated systems. The study uses dictionary-based text analysis to measure women’s issue advocacy in parliamentary speeches, based on Hansard records from Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Lesotho, and Zambia. The analysis estimates logistic regression models of candidate re-selection with MP-, party-, and country-level predictors, and tests whether the effects of women’s issue advocacy vary across party and institutional contexts. The analysis integrates party-level covariates, including mode of candidate selection, party seat share, party system, and party ideological or programmatic orientation, alongside institutional variables such as electoral system, quota adoption, and party institutionalisation. It also includes MP-level controls such as tenure, open-seat status, and quota-seat status. The study clarifies how party gatekeeping shapes the political consequences of women’s issue advocacy, particularly at the stage of intra-party candidate selection rather than electoral competition.