The Power of Appreciation: Staying in Politics Despite Hostility and Abuse

Over the past decades, women’s descriptive representation in politics has increased across many regions of the world. Yet this progress has coincided with a marked rise in gender-based violence and abuse directed at women politicians, both online and offline. Existing scholarship has convincingly documented this phenomenon as a form of backlash against women’s growing political presence and the disruption of male-dominated political norms. While this work has been crucial in exposing the scale and consequences of political violence against women, its predominant focus on harm and victimisation risks reinforcing a narrative of politics as an irredeemably hostile space, one that may inadvertently deter women from entering or remaining in political life. This paper intervenes in this debate by shifting analytical attention from violence alone to the often-overlooked sources of support, motivation, and resilience that sustain women’s political engagement despite ongoing abuse. Drawing on insights from an interdisciplinary research project (Akhtar, Jenichen, Intezar 2024), the paper adopts an appreciative inquiry approach to ask a deceptively simple but underexplored question: why do women continue to enter and remain in politics despite experiencing gender-based and intersectional abuse? Methodologically, the paper is based on semi-structured interviews with women politicians, complemented by interviews with male politicians, across party lines and levels of office in the UK, with exploratory comparative perspectives from Germany and Pakistan. Rather than centring solely on experiences of harm, the interviews foreground narratives of motivation, encouragement, recognition, and collective support. Politicians are engaged not only as research subjects but as co-producers of knowledge, reflecting on what has enabled their persistence and political effectiveness.