Elections
This post is part of Global Voices’ April 2026 Spotlight series, “Human perspectives on AI.” This series will offer insight into how AI is being used in global majority countries, how its use and implementation are affecting individual communities, what this AI experiment might mean for future generations, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.
A photograph began circulating across Bangladeshi social media on December 14, 2025, that would majorly influence the national election on February 12 — the first election since the July 2024 student-mass uprising toppled former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government. The high-stakes vote was considered a penultimate test of whether Bangladesh could rebuild and realize its hopes for a free and fair democracy following the uprising.
The image showed Shadik Kayem, 27th Vice-President of Dhaka University Central Students’ Union, sitting across a small table from another man, apparently sharing tea in what looked like a casual meeting between acquaintances. The timing made the photograph explosive: just three days earlier, Osman Hadi, the coordinator of Inqilab Moncho (Revolution Platform), a cultural organization formed by people associated with the July 2024 student-mass uprising, had been shot in Dhaka, triggering immediate political controversy about who orchestrated the attack.
Women will be massively underrepresented on ballot papers across the UK next week, campaigners say, with research revealing that almost twice as many men as women are standing as candidates across the local, mayoral and devolved elections.
Democracy campaigners say men of all political stripes are likely to dominate local government, with women’s views on issues from social care to bin collections sidelined by the huge gap between the numbers of male and female candidates.
Across all elections taking place on 7 May, a third of candidates are women and two-thirds are men, with no party achieving gender parity, according to analysis by 50:50 Parliament and Democracy Club shared exclusively with the Guardian.
In local elections in England, which account for the largest number of candidates out of all elections next Thursday, 34% of candidates are female and no party is fielding an equal number of men and women. In the six mayoral elections taking place, 18% of candidates are women; in the Senedd elections, the figure is 38%; and in the Scottish parliament elections it is 36%.
SHUNTED TO THE back, the men must wait their turn. At an election rally on the outskirts of Kolkata, in the state of West Bengal, an all-female marching group leads the way. Women are at the centre of campaigning in the state’s election, which takes place in two stages on April 23rd and 29th. Winning over female voters is also crucial in the three other states and a union territory that are holding polls this month.
By mid-May, the parliament will have completed the process of filling the 50 reserved seats for women. On Monday, the ruling BNP announced the names of its candidates for the 36 seats allocated to it in proportion to its representation in parliament, while Jamaat-e-Islami and others are expected to announce theirs soon. But in the wake of a mass uprising that intensified calls for parliamentary reforms—including increasing women’s reserved seats and holding direct elections for them—this otherwise routine procedure has become a test of whether the country is willing to move from symbolic inclusion to meaningful power-sharing.
And unless the current system is fundamentally reimagined, it risks reinforcing the very inequalities it claims to dismantle.
Ensuring equal participation and representation of women in parliament is not just a matter of democratic justice; it is foundational to democracy itself. But representation must go beyond tokenistic gestures. It must reflect the full diversity of women’s lived realities across class, ethnicity, religion, disability, and identity. Without this, inclusion becomes illusion, and democracy becomes exclusionary by design.
In 2026, women’s voices are more critical than ever.
Across the United States, decisions about healthcare access, economic stability, education, workplace protections, and access to the ballot are being debated and shaped in real time. In moments like these, civic participation becomes more than a principle; it becomes a responsibility shared by communities across the country.
Women play a central role in that participation. As voters, organizers, community leaders, and advocates, women shape how democracy responds to the realities families and communities face every day.
Women are not a small voting bloc or a niche audience in American politics. They are one of the most influential forces in civic participation today; research shows they’re more likely to register to vote and to go to the polls than men. When women vote, organize, and engage in public life, they influence the direction of policies that affect millions of people nationwide.
Kenyan women are at the forefront of defending their democracy. Their recent leadership reflects a long history of pivotal contributions, both to women’s rights and the rights of all Kenyans.
In a context of democratic backsliding, rising levels of gender-based violence (GBV), and accelerating human rights abuses in the lead-up to elections in 2027, women’s leadership is needed more than ever.
However, research shows that women’s leadership, especially in conflict or crisis, is often met with violent pushback. In Kenya and worldwide, violence targeting women in politics is deterring some women from seeking public office and punishing those who do run.
This problem is not new to Kenya, but the dichotomy between the achievements of Kenyan women leaders and the lack of accountability for their attackers, online and offline, is starker than ever.
The United Nations, the African Union, and the government of Kenya are taking steps to analyse the problem and offer recommendations, but tangible implementation lags. Meanwhile, bilateral partners that used to support women’s participation in politics and fund efforts to prevent election-related GBV have pulled back.
Despite the risks and limited tangible support, Kenyan women are pressing forward, but many fear the costs they are asked to bear are unsustainable, not to mention unconscionable.
Independent states in the Pacific region have the lowest levels of women’s political representation in the world. Fewer than 7% of Pacific politicians are women, compared with 27% globally. The absence of women’s voices in political decision-making has been consistently raised in regional forums, although progress has been slow. Yet, in November 2022, a milestone was reached: for the first time, there was at least one elected woman in every Pacific parliament.
Click here to read the full article published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on 17 October 2023.
Women’s representation in political offices continued to decline in the 2023 elections. Four main factors help explain why Africa’s largest economy is such a difficult space for women candidates.
Women’s representation in Nigerian politics has been on a downward slide since 2011, and the 2023 elections in Africa’s largest economy confirmed the expectations of poor outcomes for women. The number of women in Nigeria’s National Assembly has fallen by 19 percent compared to the last assembly, with women now occupying 3 percent of seats in the Senate and 4 percent in the House of Representatives.
To understand why Nigerian women performed so poorly in the recent elections, the 2022 primary elections provided insight into the challenges and barriers faced by women aspirants and candidates. The results of the various parties’ primary elections highlight enduring limitations to women’s representation in competitive politics in Nigeria. The country ranks in the bottom ten globally in women’s representation in national parliaments, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). This challenge of representation persists in spite of the near parity of voter registration between men and women in past election cycles.
Click here to read the full article published by Carnegie Endowment For Peace on 09 May 2023.
Online abuse has a profound impact on the health of democratic societies, threatening progress on diversity and representation in politics. Research has shown that abuse can deter women and individuals from minority groups from pursuing careers in politics, and drive those already engaged to step down from political life. The 2022 midterm elections in the US saw a growing number of candidates from minority backgrounds running for office. Faced with growing public pressure, social media companies took steps to amend their policies and community standards to address illegal and harmful content and behavior on their platforms. Evidence has shown, however, that abusive image and video-based content can fall through the cracks of content moderation, pointing to a lack of adequate response from social media platforms. In the run-up to the November 2022 midterm elections, ISD investigated abusive content on Instagram and TikTok targeting prominent women in US politics. Researchers analyzed hashtag recommendations served to users on both platforms when searching for content related to several key women in US politics in the days before the election. This report finds that platforms recommend abusive hashtags when people search for the names of these female political figures, and also promote abusive content that violate their own terms of service, showing that harmful and abusive content targeting women running for, and in-, office remains in plain sight of the platforms.
Click here to access the report.
Diagnosing women’s under-representation in electoral politics often involves a “blame game,” seeking to identify the primary factor responsible for depressing the share of women among candidates as well as elected officials. The Danish electoral system – in which parties present ordered lists of candidates but voters have the option to cast preference votes that can rearrange the list order – provides an opportunity to assess the relative role of elite versus voter bias in shaping women’s electoral fortunes. Using data from local elections in 2009, we find greater evidence for elite bias against women. We also observe, however, that voters do not widely exploit their preference votes. In an original post-election survey, we discover that “candidate gender” is less important for male and female voters than a host of other characteristics when deciding for which candidate to cast a preference vote.
Click here to access the article.
From a gender perspective, three main lessons can be learnt from the general election. First, gender issues are on the rise, a fact shown not least by the appointment of the first-ever women running mate for one of the two main presidential candidates. Second, although the ratios of women representatives at all levels are slowly but steadily increasing, the gender quota is just window dressing, which the parties blatantly ignore or work around by nominating women candidates to top-up lists. Third, violence against women in politics poses a serious threat to women’s political inclusion and citizenship.
On 9 August, Kenyans headed to the polls to elect the country’s president. In addition to the executive, Kenyans also elected 290 members of parliament, 47 governors, 47 senators, 47 women representatives and 1,450 members of county assemblies in the elections. However, the executive race was the focus of attention. Both online and offline, the two presidential contenders William Ruto and Raila Odinga engaged in rhetoric to disparage the other, a tactic that succeeded because of – and was perpetuated by – the spread of misinformation.
Click here to access the report.
A nascent body of literature has highlighter the violence (broadly defined) that women sometimes face as they enter politics. Some interpretations depict this violence as primarily gender motivated: women politicians are targeted because they are women. Another interpretation is that violence in some contexts is an everyday political practice targeting men and women alike. However, because we lack large-scale, systematic comparisons of men’s and women’s exposure to election violence, we know little about the extent to which – and how – candidate sex shape this form of violence- We address candidates in the 2018 Sri Lanka local elections. Sri Lanka is a suitable case for analysis because it is a postconflict country in which political violence has been endemic and the number of women candidates has increased rapidly due to gender quota adoption. Overall, we find large similarities in men’s and women’s exposure to violence, suggesting that violence sometimes is part of a larger political practice. However, we find that women are exposed to forms of intimidation of sexual nature more often than men. This finding demonstrated the need for gender-sensitive analyses of election violence.
Click here to access the article.