Elections
A record number of 42 female candidates were elected in Sunday’s Upper House election, marking a step forward for gender representation in Japan’s political landscape. Women won 33.6% of the 125 Upper House seats contested on Sunday, up from 35 seats in the last election in 2022.
Among the notable winners was a Democratic Party for the People (DPP) newcomer, Mayu Ushida. The 40-year-old former NHK newsreader won a seat in the highly competitive Tokyo district in which 32 candidates vied for seven seats.
“In the course of my campaign, especially since the middle of the election period, I have heard many voices from young women, students and young men — some who are 18 years old and just got the right to vote,” she said. “I really felt how anxious many of the young working generation are about their future, and felt their strong desire for something to be done.”
Full article available here.
Posters with the picture of a young woman wearing a faint smile, and her educational qualifications highlighted in bold red, are plastered across the village of Jheepa in Uttarakhand’s Almora district. Though at first glance it looks like any other poster, the message behind the absence of a man in the frame is not lost on anyone.
Sunita Devi, 32, is vying to become the gram pradhan of Jheepa, which votes in the second phase of the panchayat elections on July 28. She is the president of a women’s group called the Rachnatmak Mahila Manch that has thrown its hat in the ring for the first time since its inception in 2013, pledging to abolish the practice of “pradhan pati (husbands of elected women officials running the show as their proxies)”.
The decision to take the electoral plunge was taken at a cluster-level leader meeting of the nine “shram sakhis” — heads of the 11 clusters falling under the group — on Panchayati Raj Diwas on April 24, following which candidate selection was conducted in village-level meetings.
Full article available here.
Tokyo, July 4 (Jiji Press)--Women account for less than 30 pct of candidates competing in the July 20 election for Japan's House of Councillors, the upper chamber of parliament.
A total of 522 people filed their candidacies Thursday, when the official campaign period for the triennial Upper House election started. Of them, 152, or, 29.1 pct, are women.
Both the number of female candidates and their share were the second highest on record for an Upper House election, after 181 and 33.2 pct in the previous 2022 poll.
But the situation is far from sufficient in light of the country's law for promoting gender equality in politics, which calls on political parties to make the number of male and female candidates as equal as possible. The proportion for the July 20 poll also failed to meet the female candidate target of 35 pct set for this year under the government's basic plan for gender equality.
Japan ranked 118th among 148 countries in the World Economic Forum's global gender equality rankings for 2025, released last month.
Orginal article posted here.
Liberal candidate Lee Jae-myung has won South Korea’s snap presidential election with a clear lead. With all of the ballots counted, Lee won almost 50% of the vote, ahead of his conservative rival Kim Moon-soo on 41%. He takes over a country that is deeply divided along gender lines.
Lee’s campaign effectively channelled voter anger. He focused on resetting South Korea’s politics after impeached former president Yoon Suk Yeol, who was from the same party as Kim, unleashed chaos by declaring martial law in December 2024.
However, gender conflict has continued, subtly but powerfully, to shape voter behaviour, campaign strategies and the national debate about who is to blame for the lack of opportunities in South Korea for young men.
Full article by The Conversation.
Image by The Conversation
An Byunghui was in the middle of a video game on the night of 3 December when she learned that the South Korean president had declared martial law.
She couldn't quite believe it - until the internet blew up with the evidence. The shock announcement from then-president Yoon Suk Yeol, the now-famous shots of soldiers breaking down the windows of the National Assembly and MPs scaling the walls to force their way into the building so they could vote the motion down.
Within hours, thousands had spurred into protest, especially young women. And Byunghui joined them, travelling hundreds of miles from Daegu in the south-east to the capital Seoul.
They turned up not just because Yoon's decision had alarmed and angered them, but to protest against a president who insisted South Korea was free of sexism - despite the deep discrimination and flashes of violence that said otherwise.
They returned week after week as the investigation into Yoon's abuse of power went on - and they rejoiced when he was impeached after four dramatic months.
And yet, with the country set to elect a new president on 3 June, those very women say they feel invisible again.
The two main candidates have been largely silent about equality for women. A polarising subject, it had helped Yoon into power in 2022 as he vowed to defend men who felt sidelined in a world that they saw as too feminist. And a third candidate, who is popular among young men for his anti-feminist stance, has been making headlines.
For many young South Korean women, this new name on the ballot symbolises a new fight.
"So many of us felt like we were trying to make the world a better place by attending the [anti-Yoon] rallies," the 24-year-old college student says.
"But now, I wonder if anything has really improved… I can't shake the feeling that they're trying to erase women's voices."
Full article by the BBC.
Image source: BBC
Poland’s presidential elections are a “historic, groundbreaking” chance for Donald Tusk’s centrist party to show it was not trying to “deceive women” when it promised to change some of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws, campaigners have said.
Voters across Poland will head to the polls on Sunday in the first round of the elections to replace Andrzej Duda, the current president who is aligned with the former rightwing government and has veto power over legislation.
Polls have suggested the frontrunner is Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, whose centrist Civic Coalition led by the prime minister, Donald Tusk, has promised to relax abortion laws. But in recent weeks his lead has narrowed and support has climbed for Karol Nawrocki of the populist, anti-abortion Law and Justice (PiS) party, suggesting the two could be pitted against each other in a runoff vote on 1 June.
Full article published by The Guardian on 15 May 2025.
Image credits: The Guardian
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.
Abstract
Are women more likely to quit politics after losing their first race than men? Women’s first-time candidacies skyrocketed in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Yet we have little sense of the long-term impact of this surge in women candidates on women’s representation writ large: Inexperienced candidates are more likely to lose, and women might be especially discouraged by a loss. This might make the benefits of such a surge in candidacies fleeting. Using a regression discontinuity design and data that feature 212,805 candidates across 22,473 jurisdictions between 1950 and 2018, we find that women who narrowly lose these elections are no more likely to quit politics than men who narrowly lose. Drawing on scholarship on women’s lower political ambition, we interpret these findings to mean that women’s decision-making differs from men’s at the point of entry into politics—not at the point of reentry.
Click here to access the paper.
Executive Summary
2020 marked the historic election of Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman, first Black person, and first South Asian person to be vice president. But women’s political success in 2020 was not limited to the presidential level. After a record year for women in election 2018, the 2020 election marked continued progress for women in waging candidacies and winning elections at the congressional and state legislative levels. Unlike the historic victories for Democratic women in 2018, women’s legislative gains in 2020 were concentrated among Republicans. After a year of decline in representation across levels of office as a result of election 2018, Republican women rebounded in 2020 elections to reach new highs in legislative representation in 2021. Still, they continue to be the minority of women and of Republican legislators.
Measuring women’s electoral success means placing 2020 outcomes into historical and contemporary context. That is the work of this report. In addition to breaking down 2020 congressional and state legislative data by gender, race, and party and providing specific comparisons to the 2018 election, this report evaluates progress for women in electoral politics by looking beyond the numbers. The 2020 election reveals – via candidate paths to office and strategies for success – both maintenance and disruption of the gender and intersectional dynamics that have historically contributed to women’s political underrepresentation.
Click here to access the report published by the Center for American Women and Politics.
Elections in 2020 were profoundly marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in delays and cancellations, logistical challenges for candidates and election administrators and often low turnout. Women’s leadership was frequently in the spotlight during the pandemic. The pandemic raised complex and deeply gendered challenges for citizens and created obstacles for MPs to communicate and engage directly with their constituents. It changed the ways parliaments operate, introducing flexibility and new technologies. A substantial number of MPs across the globe were infected, many lost their lives.
Click here to access the report.
Source: IPU
Within the next two years, 38 states will hold gubernatorial elections, including two states - Virginia and New Jersey – who will hold gubernatorial elections in November 2021. These elections provide multiple opportunities for women. Nine women currently serve as governor and just 44 women have ever served in gubernatorial office in U.S. history. Candidates, including some potential women candidates, are already jockeying for the governors’ offices.
But running for office isn’t the only way women can participate in politics and wield power. Political donations provide critical resources that help candidates win elections and they signal that a candidate has support and the potential to be competitive. Furthermore, research finds that candidates and party leaders are more attentive to the interests of political donors. The 2018 and 2020 election cycles demonstrated that women are emerging as a significant force as political donors, and the 2021 and 2022 races present an opportunity for women to flex that power and make their mark in gubernatorial elections.
In The Money Hurdle in the Race for Governor, co-authors Kira Sanbonmatsu, Kathleen Rogers, and I note the dearth of women governors and the challenges women candidates face in seeking gubernatorial office. Our research also reveals that women’s giving in gubernatorial elections hasn’t reached its potential. Women make up a majority of the American electorate and vote at higher rates than men yet have lagged behind in terms of political giving. That tide may be turning.
Click here to read the full article published by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) on 14 January 2021.
This study applied a conceptual framework that uses a comparative and gendered approach to estimate the cost of politics, using a set of pre-identified variables regularly incurred by both candidates seeking political office and elected representatives while in office. This consideration was in line with the notion that analysis of election delivery and management should not be looked at in the realm of an event but rather as a cycle. The conceptual framework enabled the research team to arrive at both statistical and qualitative evidence regarding the cost of politics in Uganda.
Click here to see the report.