Elections

The Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU) has cited violence as a leading factor discouraging young women from actively participating in politics.

Zimbabwe will hold general elections next year, and women participation is pivotal as they constitute 52% of the population.

In a recent report titled “Do middle class women defend democracy?” RAU noted that young women shied away from politics mainly because of violence, polarization, corruption and nepotism.

“The general consensus was that political participation is risky and violence is too frequently a part of the contest; and politics are strongly associated with corruption and nepotism,” read part of the report.

Other reasons given for poor participation of young women in politics were difficulties encountered in registering to vote.

“The young women want to participate but are failing to find spaces they are comfortable in to express themselves politically, and it is important for them to see that sitting out is also a political statement.

Click here to read the report.

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