Women’s Underrepresentation in Lithuanian Politics: How Gendered Logics Operate Within Political Institutions

Despite the growing visibility of prominent female leaders in Lithuania – from a decade of female presidency to women leading major political parties – women remain underrepresented in political institutions, comprising less than one third of the Seimas and municipality council members. This contrast between women’s growing visibility in leadership and the continued male dominance within political institutions suggests that gendered rules within political parties may still shape political representation. The Lithuanian case, as Virginija Jurėnienė and Giedrė Purvaneckienė describe, reflects a society “halfway between tradition and modernity”, where value transformation has lagged behind socio-economic development (2023). Over the past few years, public debates on gender equality and sexuality in Lithuania – ranging from the discussions on the gender-neutral Civil Union Law to the ratification of the Istanbul Convention – have intensified, accompanied by the rise of anti-gender movements and appeals to “traditional family values”. These developments create a fertile ground for tracing how informal, gendered practices emerge within institutional settings and shape women’s political agency. This paper, based on an early stage of an ongoing PhD project, examines how masculine and feminine norms are embedded in the institutional practices of Lithuanian political parties. Drawing on feminist institutionalism, the paper focuses on analysing formal rules regulating candidate selection – party statutes, internal regulations, and other de jure frameworks – in Lithuania’s two largest parties, the Social Democratic Party (LSDP) and the Homeland Union–Lithuanian Christian Democrats (TS-LKD). Complementarily, it looks at selected parliamentary plenary debates (for instance, on the ratification of the Istanbul Convention) to gain preliminary insights into how informal rules shape the parliament as a gendered space, potentially limiting women’s political agency and reinforcing politics as a man’s domain. The Lithuanian case fills a regional gap in feminist institutionalist research by bringing in a Baltic perspective. It offers an opportunity to examine how formal rules and informal gendered norms intersect in shaping political representation and reproducing masculine political culture in a society where debates on gender equality remain deeply value-laden and contested.