Electoral systems influence descriptive representation of women. Recent literature suggests that how actors cope with institutional provisions (such as electoral systems) should be looked at more closely, it is worthwhile to study provisions for preferential voting, and how these can be (and are effectively) used by voters to further the presence of women. The focus of this paper will be on Belgium’s flexible list system. In this system, voters have the option between casting a list vote and casting a vote for one or more candidates. This latter option opens a whole variety of gender-based voting acts: voters can either choose for candidates of the same sex (same-gender voting), for candidates of a different sex (cross-gender voting), or for mix of candidates of both sexes (mixed-gender voting).
Local elections in Belgium are particularly interesting for yet two other reasons. These elections are, first of all, highly visible (Deschouwer, 2009) and consequently, voters are often familiar with candidates, which would mean that information shortcuts (such as a candidate’s gender) are less frequently used. Secondly, quota legislation stipulates that in every municipality the number of women candidates is equal to that of men. Hence, an important contextual variable (the number of women candidates) is held constant.
The aim of this paper is twofold: mapping the frequency of the diverse types of gender-based voting, and estimating the effects of individual voter characteristics (gender, level of education, etc.) and context-related characteristics (district magnitude, competitiveness, etc.) on the propensity of gender-based voting. The analysis will be based on the ‘PartiRep Exit-Poll 2012’ dataset (N = 4,700), which was held in 40 local municipalities all over Belgium at the occasion of the 2012 local elections. Voters were presented a ‘mock ballot’ on which they could cast their vote(s) as they did in the polling booth.
