Demand-Side Explanations for Gender Gaps in Political Endurance: The role of parties’ candidate selection, equality commitment and size

Women continue to be underrepresented among senior politicians, suggesting that formal equality in access to office has not translated into equal opportunities for political endurance. This paper examines how party-level organizational characteristics shape this gendered pattern of endurance. Bridging the literatures on gender and representation with the party literature, we argue that the same party features that once facilitated women’s entry—such as centralized party selection and equality-oriented party reforms—may not necessarily support their endurance. Empirically we have combined individual level MP data from 13 – mainly European – democracies and the Political Party Database. We find that gender remains a crucial determinant of career length, disadvantaging women. Decentralized candidate selection and large parties are conducive factors for MP endurance, but only party size significantly supports women’s persistence, while none of the tested party organizational traits shape men’s career length. In sum, gender matters for career length, but organizational features traditionally associated with securing women’s entry into politics, have little role when it comes to securing their endurance. These results have real-world implications by serving as a prompt to political parties, as core actors in candidate selection, to expand their organizational toolbox to equalize current power imbalances in parliament resulting from differing career length between men and women.