Parties and Sexual Harassment Rules in Canada: A Feminist Institutionalist Comparative Analysis

Gender-based violence in politics (GBV-P) is a growing problem that has recently been the subject of scholarly attention worldwide (see for example Krook 2020; Restrepo Sanin 2019; Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2023) as well as in Canada (see most recently Raney and Collier 2024). This research has shown how GBV-P threatens democracy and participation rates of women-identified and gender minority political actors (particularly those who have intersecting racialized and other minoritized identities). We have examined institutional approaches to dealing with GBV-P in legislatures, focusing on codes of conduct between elected politicians (see Collier and Raney 2018) as well as other legislative parliamentary rules enacted to protect women identified political actors from GBV-P (see Raney and Collier 2022). This paper will look at a different, yet central political institution inside of the political process – political parties – to examine how they have addressed GBV-P and sexual harassment, in particular. Our unique study will use a feminist institutionalist lens to comparatively locate and then examine party policies and codes in all 14 federal and provincial/territorial jurisdictions across Canada (expanding earlier work completed last year in three provinces and the federal government) to see what is being done to address the problem inside the parties themselves. What works and what doesn’t; and how can parties improve their approaches to GBV-P and in turn positively impact women’s participation in the political process?