Elections
There’s a question that has consistently gripped Botswana’s politics: bomme ba kae? (where are the women?). It became even more urgent with the country’s 2024 general elections.
Only 28 women stood for parliament out of 258 contestants, representing 10.85%. Only three women won their seats. This represents 4.92% of the 61 seats. It’s a drop from 5.26% in the 2019 elections.
In Botswana, women make up 54% of the eligible voters. Yet few occupy the corridors of power, where decisions and policies that affect them are made.
The country has been praised for being a model democracy. One of the reasons is that it has held regular elections since independence in 1966.
There are, however, flaws in Botswana’s democracy. One is that women are woefully under-represented in government.
I am a scholar of public policy in southern Africa. I am also a proponent of equal representation of women, who are a marginalised majority. In my research I argue that women’s limited participation hinders the consolidation of democracy.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 13 December 2024.
Image by The Conversation
What you need to know:
-
In a historic moment for African politics, Ghana elected its first female vice-president and Namibia elected its first female president, joining Tanzania's Samia Suluhu Hassan in the continent's apex female leadership.
-
Both leaders bring impressive credentials to their roles - Opoku-Agyemang as a former university vice-chancellor and education minister, and Nandi-Ndaitwah with over 25 years in senior public offices.
-
While these appointments mark significant progress for gender equality in African politics, challenges remain as evidenced by the low representation of women in Ghana's cabinet and parliament, though Namibia shows better progress with 44.2% women parliamentarians.
The year draws to a close with two momentous political achievements in Africa. On December 7, Ghana re-wrote history by electing its first ever female vice president in Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, as running mate of former President John Dramani Mahama, now president elect, under the National Democratic Congress which won with 56.55 percent of the votes.
Read here the full article published by The Nation Africa on 18 December 2024.
Image by The Nation Africa
Ahead of 2024, political experts and commentators were calling this “the year of democracy”. It was deemed a “make or break year”, as around 1.5 billion people went to the polls in more than 50 countries, which held significant elections.
For women, who are already underrepresented in global politics, there were some critical victories and losses.
Based on statistics from UN Women alongside current election updates, Women’s Agenda has calculated there are 30 countries where 31 women serve as Heads of State and/or Government. Just 20 countries have a woman Head of State, and 17 countries have a woman Head of Government.
At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.
As authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide as well, national elections grappled with challenges involving voter participation, free speech, and electoral independence.
Here’s a look back at some of this year’s most influential election results for women.
Read here the full article published by the Women’s Agenda on 16 December 2024.
Image by Women’s Agenda
This has been a historic electoral year, with more than 1.6 billion citizens called to cast their votes in 2024. In more than 70 countries, people have decided the political path of their nations. Yet we end this cycle with the sense that democracy is more threatened than ever.
There is an undeniable disconnect between citizens and their leaders. The scepticism and lack of trust should not surprise us. We are not leaving an easy world behind, especially for younger generations. Climate breakdown, the lack of economic opportunities, social injustice, the global housing crisis – these challenges have steadily eroded the democratic ideal. As a result, our societies are facing a wave of distrust in democratic institutions, particularly among younger citizens.
This scenario highlights a fundamental issue many governments face: is it possible that representative democracy has stopped representing us?
There is one area where the numbers speak for themselves, and the message isn’t a positive one. Globally, less than 30% of parliamentary seats are held by women, and fewer than 30 countries are led by women. While these figures are better than in previous years, they still reflect a chronic problem; at this pace, it would take us roughly 130 years to achieve gender equality.
To put this into perspective, a plastic bag takes about 100 years to decompose. If we were to use one today, it would vanish from this planet before democracies achieve gender parity. Gender isn’t the only example of the disconnect between politics and people, but it is a particularly stark one: how can our system of representation neglect half of the people it is meant to represent?
Read here the full article published by The Guardian on 6 December 2024.
Image by Guardian
Voting began on Friday morning in Ireland's general election amid a tight race between the incumbent coalition parties and the opposition party Sinn Fein.
The polls opened at 7 a.m. (0800 CET) and are scheduled to close at 10 p.m.
The ballot will see a total of 174 seats of the lower chamber of parliament — the Dail — being filled, which is more than ever before.
Over 3 million voters are registered to cast their ballot in an election that has been focused on the country's cost-of-living and housing crises, the response to an uptick in immigration, and economic management for potential future trade shocks.
Which parties are contesting?
Opinion polls put the country's three big parties — center-right Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, and the leftist-nationalist Sinn Fein — each at around 20%.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fail — two parties that came up from opposing sides of the Irish civil war in the 1920s — set aside a nearly century-old rivalry and agreed to share power after the general election in 2020 saw an inconclusive result.
Read here the full article published by DW News on 29 November 2024.
Image by DW News
WINDHOEK, NAMIBIA — Namibia extended voting for a second time Thursday with the opposition crying foul after logistical failures prevented many people from casting their ballots in the closely fought election.
With the ruling party facing its strongest challenge yet, opposition parties called for a halt to the vote counting and said they had lost confidence in the process.
The polls are a key test for the liberation-era South West Africa People's Organization party that has governed the mineral-rich country since independence 34 years ago. But SWAPO is being challenged by a younger generation of voters frustrated by high unemployment and enduring inequalities.
About 1.5 million people in the sparsely populated desert nation were registered to vote in Wednesday's presidential and legislative elections.
Many were still in line when polls were scheduled to close at 9 p.m. Wednesday, some saying they were in line for 12 hours.
The Electoral Commission of Namibia kept some polling stations open overnight into Thursday and allowed others to begin ballot counting.
Read here the full article published by the Voice of America on 28 November 2024.
Image by Voice of America
Electoral management bodies (EMBs) are responsible for ensuring a level playing field for political representation and meaningful participation across the entire electoral cycle. Yet, International IDEA data shows that only 22% of EMBs themselves are chaired by women.
When disaggregated by regions (Figure 1.), data from 242 EMBs in 208 countries and territories shows that the percentages indicating the number of women chairing EMBs are below the global average on three continents, with Asia recording the lowest numbers (10%), followed by Oceania (11%) and Africa (19%).
Click here to read the full article published by International IDEA on 7 November 2021.
Although the landscape for female candidates in U.S. politics has improved, research continues to find that many voters possess sexist attitudes. We rely on a standard political communication framework to help reconcile sexism in the electorate with increasingly favorable outcomes for women in primary elections. Based on two national survey experiments, we first demonstrate that in the absence of gendered campaign rhetoric, sexism is a weak predictor of support for female candidates on both sides of the political aisle. We then show, however, that when a male candidate attempts to activate sexism among voters by attacking a female opponent, gender attitudes become more salient—but not to the woman’s disadvantage. In a Democratic primary, gendered attacks backfire and lead to a significant boost in support for the female candidate. On the Republican side, a male candidate does not face the same backlash, but the attacks do very little to depress his female opponent’s support. While the persistence of hostile attitudes toward women has slowed the march toward gender equality in society, our experimental results suggest that sexism exerts only contingent effects in primary elections and not systematically to female candidates’ detriment.
Click here to download the paper published by Sage Journals on 23 September 2021.
By Roudabeh Kishi
Attacks on women in politics are on the rise around the world. New data and research from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reveal how physical violence targeting women in politics is creating dangerous – and at times lethal – obstacles to women’s participation in political processes. Even as women are engaging in elections in record numbers around the world – both by seeking office and by voting – they are being met with an increasingly violent backlash.
Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Mexico, Colombia, China, India, Brazil, Burundi, Myanmar, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Cuba top the list of the most violent countries in the world for women in politics. With rapidly evolving political situations as well as upcoming elections in many of these countries, the threat of violence targeting women in politics may only grow in the new year. Examining key trends from the latest political violence data for these countries will provide a glimpse of what to watch for in 2022 when it comes to the risks facing women in politics.
Click here to read the full article published by GIWPS on 28 January 2022.
According to Palestinian Central Elections Commission data, the first phase of the 2021 local council elections showed the extent of women candidates in competing lists. Results indicated that the percentage of women who won through voting in lists was 20.5% and the overall percentage in all local councils (voting and acclamation) was 21.8%, which reflects a slight increase in the percentage of the women’s quota. This points to the importance of the quota, which maintained the presence of women in local councils, especially since there are many councils in Bethlehem for example, which refused to present a list on the premise of their rejection of women’s participation.
As for youth participation, according to CEC data, the percentage of youth between the ages of 25-35 was 21.7%; between 36-45 the percentage was 27.4%, between 46-55 it was 28.6% and those above 55 was 22.3%. It should be noted that the age of youth, according to the UN, is between 18-29 while the candidacy age in Palestine is still at 25 for local councils. The closest percentage to this was 21.7% up to 35 years of age, which drops to 19.4% in councils where elections were held, followed by 24.5% for the 36-45 age bracket.
Click here to read the full report published by Miftah on 5 January 2022.
Abstract
Although female political representation in the Arab world has nearly doubled in the last decade, little is known about how voters in the region view female politicians and their political platforms, particularly in a new democracy like Tunisia. We conduct original conjoint and vignette survey experiments to examine the effects of candidate gender and gender- and leadership-congruent political platforms on voter support. Building on role congruity theory, we find evidence of bias against female candidates among voters, particularly among respondents who hold patriarchal gender norms. Additionally, we find that all respondents are more likely to prefer candidates who emphasize security issues rather than women’s rights. Overall, our study suggests that female candidates who emphasize issues congruent with stereotypes of political leadership, such as security, can increase voter support, though respondents also reward male candidates who appeal to leadership congruent issues.
Click here to access the paper published by Springer.
Abstract
Research on election violence often does not capture its psychological and gendered dimensions. Gender differences on the continuum of violence, as acknowledged in other fields, are applied here to election violence. Specifically, this article explores ways to unveil the forms of election violence that are hidden from the view of an external observer because they are either not carried out in public or not recognized as violence. Survey data and interview material was collected from men and women political candidates participating in the 2014 national elections in the Maldives. The study concludes that the continuum of violence is relevant for adequately assessing the full range of illegitimate acts used against men and women candidates to affect electoral races. Women candidates in the Maldives were more exposed than men candidates to threats and to verbal and figurative sexualized aggression.
Click here to read the full article published by Sage Journals on 12 March 2021.