Why Women Leak Out: Issue Specialization, Clientelism, and Gendered Political Career in South Korea and Taiwan

South Korea and Taiwan have experienced a fourfold increase in women’s parliamentary presence since the early 1990s, supported by gender quotas and broader democratic consolidation. Yet women remain significantly disadvantaged in political career progression: they are less likely to be re-elected, rarely reach top legislative, executive or party positions, and disproportionately exit politics after a single term. This paper explains this “leaky pipeline” by linking gendered issue specialization to clientelistic electoral incentives. I argue that one overlooked mechanism behind women’s stalled careers is the lower particularistic value of the issues they tend to prioritize. Despite their status as advanced democracies, South Korea and Taiwan retain strongly clientelistic party–voter linkages and materialist voter expectations, reinforced by mixed-member electoral systems where district races remain politically decisive. In these contexts, “men’s issues”—such as agriculture, construction, fisheries, or regional development—offer clear opportunities for geographically targeted benefits, enabling legislators to build personal vote bases and secure re-election. By contrast, “women’s issues”—such as childcare, gender equality, or welfare reform—are typically programmatic, national in scope, and less convertible into localized electoral returns. As a result, male legislators are structurally advantaged because they disproportionately engage in issues that align with the dominant clientelistic logic. The paper employs a mixed-methods design. Quantitatively, it draws on eight electoral cycles (1992–2024), bill sponsorship data (>100,000 bills), and legislator career trajectories to examine how gender, issue focus, and region-targeting shape re-election odds and seniority. Qualitatively, 30 elite interviews with Korean and Taiwanese legislators illuminate how clientelism, materialist voter expectations, and gendered norms of availability (e.g., “24/7 constituency service”) disadvantage women, especially when moving from party-list to district competition. The study makes the first systematic contribution demonstrating the elective affinity between men’s issues and majoritarian/clientelistic structures, revealing how issue-based inequality—rather than candidate-level deficits—produces gendered career disparities. It advances debates on gendered political opportunity structures and calls for re-evaluating quotas and electoral reforms that overlook the political economy of issue specialization.