Elections
Examining the diversity of first-time candidates in last year’s federal election is a revealing exercise on many levels and serves as a sharper measure of distinct party efforts to recruit visible minority candidates.
By taking this analysis a step further and breaking down first-time visible minority candidates by gender, we find further evidence of a persistent gap in female candidates, whether visible minority or not.
Recent analyses have focused on women being nominated as sacrificial lamb candidates in unwinnable or swing ridings. Some exceptions have focused on visible minorities, either in the form of experimental polling or actual results.
The question we explored was whether visible minority women less likely to be nominated in competitive ridings. The data we found suggests that visible minority women confront compounded biases and discrimination in the political process thatmay work against them in favour of a more traditional view of the ideal politician.
As Bangladesh awaits the result of the 2026 national parliamentary election, one statistic should give us pause. Only 78 women are contesting the election — just under 4% of nearly 2,000 candidates. It is being described as a "record number".
Even in the 2024 national election, 128 women (4.71%) contested among 2,713 total candidates. In 2019, 22 women were elected to general seats. This backsliding says more about how political power is structured in Bangladesh than about women's political capacity.
Recently, at a day-long national conference titled Rupture, Reform, and Reimagining Democracy: Navigating the Agony of Transition, organised by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) at BRAC University to reflect on Bangladesh's political transition, a speaker jokingly asked: "Is Bangladesh ready for a male prime minister?"
A global wave of Gen Z-led protests have called for a fundamental restructuring of government and politics. Upcoming elections in Bangladesh and Nepal could offer young voters an opportunity for meaningful reform
Citizens in Bangladesh and Nepal head to the polls on February 12 and March 5, respectively, for the first general elections since youth-led uprisings toppled both countries’ governments. The two countries are seeking to rebuild their government institutions, but the elections could reflect the political headwinds in the region. Despite similar reform sentiments appearing in Japan and Thailand over the past few years, voters in those recent elections chose to back pro-establishment, conservative parties.
In August 2024, students in Bangladesh protested job quotas favoring those with ties to the previous political party in power, while in September 2025, protests against nepotism erupted in Nepal after social media posts by the children of political elites appeared to flaunt lavish lifestyles.
The two movements have had cascading effects. Since 2024, Bangladesh has been governed by an interim administration after protests led to the ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India. In Nepal, parliament was set ablaze during the 2025 protests, prompting the resignation of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli. Nepal’s so-called Gen Z protest helped spark a wave of youth-led movements under the banner of Generation Z—those born between 1997 and 2012.
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The Liberal Democratic Party’s lopsided victory was not the only record set in the Feb. 8 Lower House election.
A total of 313 women ran as candidates, accounting for 24.4 percent of the 1,284 contenders and surpassing the previous high of 23.4 percent.
Sixty-eight women were elected on Feb. 8, representing 14.6 percent of all winners. Twenty-eight of the female candidates won in single-seat districts and 40 gained seats through proportional representation.
Only the 2024 Lower House election had more female winners, at 73.
By party, the LDP endorsed the most successful female candidates, with 39, followed by eight each with the Centrist Reform Alliance (Chudo), the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) and Sanseito.
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As the clock hit midnight, the women held their flame torches aloft and marched into the Dhaka night. “The people have given their blood, now we want equality,” they shouted above the roar of the traffic.
For many in Bangladesh, the past few weeks have been a cause for jubilation. The first free and fair elections in 17 years have been promised for Thursday, after the toppling of the regime of Sheikh Hasina in a bloody student-led uprising in August 2024 in which more than 1,000 people died.
Opposition figures long persecuted and jailed are now running as candidates, freely holding rallies for the first time in years. The former prime minister is languishing in exile in India and facing a death sentence for crimes against humanity in Bangladesh, and her Awami League party is banned from contesting the election.
Yet for swathes of women in the country, including those who were at the forefront of the revolution, the hope of the election has become tinged with disappointment and fear, amid a resurgence of regressive Islamist politics that it is feared will impinge upon women’s rights and a dearth of female candidates in the running.
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More than 300 participants at a public dialogue highlight barriers to women's political participation and sign petitions demanding equal representation in decision-making roles.
Women leaders, activists and youth representative have demanded and end to the systemic exclusion of women from politics in Nepal. Speaking at a public dialogue 'Excluded by Design: Women, Politics and Ethical Failure' they said the political mindset remains the same even after the Gen Z movement.
The Dialogue also highlighted that women make up 52 per cent of Nepal's population only 396 of the 3,486 candidate in the upcoming House of Representatives elections are women. Speakers emphasized that this indicates not a failure on the part of women, but of the system.RT
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In this In brief, the authors consider lessons learned in the aftermath of women candidates’ defeat in the 18 November 2021 general election. They identify five intractable barriers to women’s election in Tonga: voters’ expectations of reciprocity in exchange for electoral support; deeply entrenched perceptions of men’s legitimacy as political leaders; untimely support for women candidates; an inhospitable political environment for electoral gender quotas; and a lack of accountability on gender equality commitments.
Click here to read the full article.
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.