Elections
In a country marked by deeply rooted patriarchal structures, Claudia Sheinbaum has risen as one of Mexico’s most relevant political figures, breaking barriers and challenging stereotypes that for generations have limited women in power. A scientist by training and the first woman elected to govern Mexico City, Sheinbaum represents a leadership that combines technical pragmatism, social sensitivity and an unwavering resilience that has defined every step of her public career.
Claudia Sheinbaum took office as Mexico City’s Chief of Government in 2018, following her tenure as a delegate in Tlalpan, where she stood out for her commitment to transparency and support for the most vulnerable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her proactive leadership and strong scientific background came to the fore, implementing data-driven public health measures and clear and empathetic communication with citizens, always seeking to protect the most vulnerable.
Throughout her administration, Claudia Sheinbaum has promoted inclusive social policies, always with an eye on improving the quality of life of the most disadvantaged sectors and reducing inequality. Her closeness with today’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has consolidated her as an essential figure of the so-called Fourth Transformation, being a leader who has promoted sorority and the collective advancement of women in politics.
What truly defines Claudia Sheinbaum’s leadership is her ability to challenge stereotypes without losing her authenticity. In a context where women’s assertiveness is often judged harshly – labeling them as “aggressive” or “authoritarian” – Sheinbaum has demonstrated that this quality is not a defect, but an essential virtue for those who assume responsibilities of power. Understanding that being strong, assertive and even “tough” is, on many occasions, necessary to face the challenges of political leadership, has been key in her trajectory.
Read here the full article published by Pressenza on 2 October 2024.
Image credits: Pressenza
On a sunny September morning, Joyce Trindade works her way around the stalls of a secondhand clothing market here, distributing hugs and political pamphlets in equal measure. A candidate in this weekend’s Rio de Janeiro city council elections, she’s in the bustling commercial neighborhood to show that a woman’s place is in politics, she tells the vendors, all of whom are women.
This is the first time that Ms. Trindade, in her late 20s, is running for a seat on Rio’s city council. She’s one of 158,000 female candidates participating in nationwide local elections, and seeking to break into the overwhelmingly male world of electoral politics.
Despite electing a woman president in 2010, Brazil has one of the lowest levels of female political representation in Latin America, ranking almost dead last. Women hold just 17.5% of seats in the lower house of Congress, and are similarly absent from state and municipal bodies, even after more than two decades of legislative and grassroots efforts to increase their presence. As many Latin American countries have reached political parity – a benchmark associated with policies that often better serve women and children – Brazilian political parties have found ways to work around the law, and cultural stereotypes about women are widespread, experts say.
Read here the full article published by The Christian Science Monitor on 3 October 2024.
Image credits: The Christian Science Monitor
For decades, a key goal of activists and policymakers has been involving women in politics. Achieving gender parity in the political realm – that is, seeing more women running for and winning political office – is not merely a rhetorical goal. In fact, research has shown that women bring unique perspectives and focuses to lawmaking. A seminal study by Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo showed that when women are given a seat at the table, they implement policies more relevant to the needs of women generally.
Many countries have implemented targeted electoral laws, known as “gender quotas,” as part of an effort to increase women’s political participation. These laws vary in the size of the quota, whether the quotas are legally enforced, at what stage of the election process they are enforced, which branch of government they are applied to (legislative, executive, judicial) and what level of government they are applied to (local, regional, federal). India reserves a minority of districts for women to lead, while in France, it is mandated in municipal elections that half of the candidates each party nominates must be women. Designing each system requires trade-offs: while a reserved seat system like India’s guarantees that at least some women will be elected, such strict systems could face legal opposition in their implementation.
Read here the full article published by Boston University Global Development Policy Center on 1 October 2024.
Image by Boston University Global Development Policy Center
All signs suggest that the partisan divide over changing gender roles in society could widen even further in the 2024 election, adding a new source of uncertainty to a contest already on a knife’s edge.
Donald Trump’s recent declaration to female voters that “I will be your protector” offered the latest demonstration of the former president’s determination to consolidate the voters most committed to traditional gender roles and family structures – a culturally conservative group that includes not only many men but also a large number of women.
In the process, though, political strategists in both parties believe the GOP nominee risks further alienating the broad array of voters who are comfortable with the social changes that have challenged those traditional patterns of family life, especially women. Younger, college-educated and single women are likely to be particularly resistant to the idea that they need protecting by any man – much less one in Trump, who has been found liable for sexual abuse in a New York civil case and who faces specific allegations of sexual misconduct from dozens of other women.
Read here the full article published by CNN on 1 October 2024.
Image by CNN
Introduction
Women, and women of color in particular, face numerous challenges when running for political office in the U.S. These include attacks they are subject to in various online spaces that, like their peers, they must use to campaign and promote their work. These attacks often aim to undermine and prevent women’s participation in politics. Previous research by CDT found that women of color Congressional candidates in the 2020 U.S. election were more likely to be subjected to violent and sexist abuse, and mis- and disinformation on X/Twitter compared to other candidates. These forms of abuse might contribute to the underrepresentation of women of color in politics, and may also undermine the effectiveness of the US democratic system in reflecting the interest and priorities of all voters in policy-making.
In this research brief, we turn to the 2024 U.S. elections to examine the nature of offensive speech and hate speech that candidates running for Congress are subject to on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), which remains an important forum for political candidates. More specifically, we compare the levels of offensive speech and hate speech that different groups of Congressional candidates are targeted with based on race and gender, with a particular emphasis on women of color. We also examine these factors for U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as a woman of color and presidential candidate.
Read here the full report published by Center for Democracy & Technology on 2 October 2024.
Image credits: Center for Democracy & Technology
Moldova is heading to the polls in October for presidential elections and an EU referendum, with pro-European incumbent President Maia Sandu seeking a second term but facing Kremlin-backed candidates and disinformation.
The country's election on 20 October 2024 will be only the third direct presidential election since Moldova’s independence from the Soviet Union and the abolition of the previous system of parliament electing the president.
Sandu is campaigning as a pro-European candidate against many pro-Russian or only nominally pro-European candidates who previously supported closer ties with Russia.
Her main challenger and likeliest opponent in a potential second round of voting is former Prosecutor General Alexandr Stoianoglo.
Stoianoglo is nominally running as a pro-European candidate but is backed by the Socialists, the largest pro-Russian party in parliament, and has been speaking publicly about the need to maintain Moldova’s neutrality and to have a more balanced relationship between Russia and the EU.
At the same time, the former prosecutor general is defending himself in multiple court cases involving corruption and bribery during his time in office.
Read here the full article published by Euroactiv on 27 September 2024.
Image by Euroactiv
Despite women comprising nearly half of the world’s population, they continue to be drastically underrepresented in political leadership positions around the world. In fact, most have little or no access to the very decision-making tables where the policies are made that govern their lives.
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all model when it comes to designing and implementing successful women’s empowerment programs related to political participation. All too often the focus in this sphere centers on election data, such as turnout of women voters, how many women competed as candidates, and how many women obtained seats. However, the barriers to women’s progress in this field are complex, and successful interventions must take into account the holistic nature of the issue.
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Based on its experience conducting gender assessments of elections throughout the world, as well as a review of external research and analysis of women’s participation in elections, IRI has developed a framework for this assessment based on a three-part typology of barriers. Individual barriers impede women’s self-efficacy and empowerment. Government barriers include legislative and regulatory provisions that undermine—through omission or commission—women’s participation. Societal barriers include norms of patriarchy or misogyny that exclude women from participating fully in the public sphere. These three types of barriers can exist in isolation and have discrete effects on women’s political participation. However, they are more often mutually constitutive and reinforcing. For example, electoral rules that fail to explicitly protect women’s access to political and electoral processes often indicate deeply embedded social norms of patriarchy. Therefore, the barriers to women’s political participation in any society are often multidimensional, reflecting the complex interaction of cultural values and institutional rules. Consequently, overcoming these barriers necessitates not simply encouraging women to overcome them, or even changing laws and practices, but also transforming the gender norms that undergird them.
Click here to access the study.
In an effort to address the persistent gender gap at the highest levels of political office, this study investigates one of the stereotype-based social costs that women face as political candidates. Because power and power-seeking are central to the way masculinity is socially constructed and communality is central to the construction of femininity, intentionally seeking power is broadly seen as anti-communal and inconsistent with the societal rules for women’s behavior. The study aims to determine whether women political candidates who are seen to be seeking a political office as a means to gain power will be penalized for their seeming lack of communality. More specifically, the authors suggest that women’s power-seeking will evoke emotional reactions of contempt and disgust and therefore voters will be less likely to support their candidacy.
Findings
- Voters are less likely to vote for female politicians when they perceive them as power-seeking, though male politicians are not penalized.
- All things being equal, study participants were likely to perceive female politicians as being just about equally power-seeking as male politicians.
- When participants saw male politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having greater agency (i.e., being more assertive, stronger, and tougher) and greater competence, while this was not true for their perceptions of power-seeking female politicians.
- When participants saw female politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having less communality (i.e., being unsupportive and uncaring), while this was not true for their perceptions of power-seeking male politicians.
- When female politicians were described as power-seeking, participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust) towards them.
- Participant gender had no impact on any of the study outcomes – that is, women were just as likely as men to have negative reactions to power-seeking female politicians.
- In short, both a power-seeking image and expressed power-seeking intent can bias voters against female politicians.
Click here to access the paper.
For women across the world, electoral politics can be a hostile and violent place. Women who stand for office can expect casual sexism and discrimination, ranging from snide remarks about their appearance to being propositioned by their male colleagues. In some countries, this psychological violence escalates to physical violence in which men seek to make the public sphere so inhospitable for women that they disengage from electoral politics.
Writer Nanjala Nyabola investigates in this paper the parliamentary quota systems in East Africa and demonstrates how well quotas can work when supported with institutional will and how resoundingly they can fail when patriarchal political spaces conspire to undo them. All of the eight countries that are traditionally thought to make up East Africa—Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan—have quotas entrenched in their electoral systems.These quotas take different shapes however.
Click here to read the paper.
It is a well-established finding that proportional representation (PR) is associated with greater female legislative representation than single member majoritarian systems However, the degree to which different types of PR rules affect voting for female candidates has not been fully explored. The existing literature is hampered by a reliance on cross-national data in which individual vote preferences and electoral system features affect one another.
In this study, Sona N. Golder, Laura B. Stephenson, Karine van der Straeten, André Blais, Damien Bol, Philipp Harfst and Jean-François Laslier draw upon an experiment conducted during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections to isolate the effects of different PR electoral systems. Participants in the experiment were given the opportunity to vote for real EP candidates in three different electoral systems: closed list, open list, and open list with panachage and cumulation. Because voter preferences can be held constant across the three different votes, the authors could evaluate the extent to which female candidates were more or less advantaged by the electoral system itself. The study concludes that voters, regardless of their gender, support female candidates, and that this support is stronger under open electoral rules. Concerns about voters being put off because of the presence of women on the ballot appear to be unfounded.
Click here to read the study.
Georgia’s October 2016 parliamentary elections were characterized by an open political environment, a competitive campaign, overall results that were validated by credible observers, and some underlying problems that need concerted attention. NDI's final report draws attention to a set of recommendations that could contribute to greater public confidence in the approaching local and presidential elections.
The elections were characterized by an open political environment, a competitive campaign, overall results that were validated by credible observers, and some underlying problems that need concerted attention.
Yet the elections highlighted some problems. The most pressing of these were incidents of violence and intimidation that occurred throughout the process; concerns about the qualifications, neutrality, and competence of some polling station commissioners; and questions about the impartiality and consistency of adjudication measures. In addition, the elections underscored shortcomings related to the legal framework, parties’ campaign strategies, election observation, campaign financing and the misuse of administrative resources, and the underrepresentation of women and minority groups.
Women in Georgia were well represented among voters (51.1 percent), observers, and election administrators, demonstrating their commitment to and engagement in politics and elections. However, women were underrepresented as candidates, making up only 17 percent of majoritarian candidates and 37 percent of party list candidates. At this stage, it appears that only three parties and one bloc qualified for the financial incentive of a 30 percent increase in state funding for including three candidates of a different gender in every 10 names on their proportional lists, with Patriots’ Alliance the only party to both qualify for the financial benefit and pass the threshold to hold seats in parliament. The overall number of women MPs did increase slightly, from 18 (12 percent) prior to the election to 24 (16 percent); however, fewer women majoritarian MPs were elected -- five in October as compared to seven in the previous parliament.
Click here to read the full report.
For more information, contact:
In Georgia: Diana Chachua, dchachua@ndi.org, 577 779639
In the United States: Emily Rodriguez, erodriguez@ndi.org, +1 202 728-5500
Women participation in different aspects of elections is increasing in Tanzania, but candidates still have to contend with many challenges, the Tanzania National Elections Gender Assessment report says. The report by the International Republican Institute (IRI), notes, however, that while the percentage of women representation through affirmative action is picking up, many of the women are still reluctant to go for competitive elective posts. The IRI notes in the report that the 2015 General Election saw noteworthy developments in the women's participation in politics. For more details, read the report here.
Source: AllAfrica Global Media