Elections
Toplines
U.S. Congress
Women in the 119th Congress: Thus far, 148 (109D, 39R) women will serve in the 119th Congress in 2025 (current record: 151, set in 2023). They will be at least 27.7% of all members of Congress. Currently, 151 (107D, 43R, 1Ind) women serve in the U.S. Congress, holding 28.2% of all seats. Five (3D, 2R) women candidates remain in congressional contests that are too close to call.
Women in the U.S. Senate: Twenty-five (16D, 9R) women will serve in the U.S. Senate in 2025 (current record: 26, first set in 2020). They will be 25% of all members of the Senate. Currently, 25 (15D, 9R, 1Ind) serve in the U.S. Senate, holding 25% of all seats.
Women in the U.S. House: Thus far, 123 (93D, 30R) women will serve in the U.S. House in 2025 (current record: 126, set in 2023). They will be at least 28.3% of all members of the U.S. House. Currently, 126 (92D, 34R) women serve in the U.S. House, holding 29% of all seats. Five (3D, 2R) women candidates remain in U.S. House contests that are too close to call.
Read here the full article published by CAMP on 14 November 2024.
Image by CAWP
Donald Trump’s victory was helped in no small part by the unexpected shift of support he received among Gen Z voters.
While voters under the age of 30 still broke for Kamala Harris, her margin of victory was much smaller than the one enjoyed by President Joe Biden, who, according to a survey based on 2020 validated voter files, secured 59 percent of the youth vote compared with 35 percent of young voters who backed Trump. Depending on which exit poll you view, Trump improved his performance by between 8 points and 11 points among young voters compared with the 2020 race.
Trump’s performance with the nation’s youngest voters, however, was very uneven along gender lines. Analysis of the AP Vote Cast Survey by CIRCLE at Tufts University shows young women preferred Harris to Trump by an 18-point margin (58 percent to 40 percent), while young men broke for Trump by 15 points (56 percent to 42 percent). Trump’s gains among young male voters were particularly large, as a slight majority of men under 30 backed Joe Biden just four years ago.
Why did Trump do so much better among young men?
Read here the full article published by The Hill on 13 November 2024.
Image by The Hill
Right now, we’re existing in an especially tense and unstable “in between.”
We know what’s to come next January – yet at the same time, we have no idea what’s to come. Once-again President-elect Donald Trump has already promised mass deportations and a gutting of the Department of Education. His followers have already shown us shades of their callousness to come, in telling women that consent is now a matter of, in their disgusting words, “your body, my choice.” But we have no clue if there is a rock-bottom still looming below.
At present, I – and most every politically engaged progressive I’ve spoken with – is in a place of: “What can I do about it?” Some of us are taking quiet moments to regroup, to prepare bodies and minds and spirits for a long haul. And then there are people like me, who have spent the past week being rather vocal – encouraging others against the allure of quick fixes, while also howling against each new sign of injustice that crops up in the social media feeds we (fine, I) can’t quite step away from.
There is another option, though. As a number of the women candidates I’ve spoken with throughout 2024 have proposed, we might also consider running for office ourselves.
Read here the full article published by The Story of Exchange on 13 November 2024.
Image by The Story of Exchange
A notable number of women are contesting Sri Lanka’s general elections on Thursday, signalling a potential shift in the nation’s male-dominated political landscape, but analysts warn simply having more female candidates is not enough to transform the country’s leadership culture.
The rise in female candidates come as Sri Lankans prepare to elect the first parliament under the country’s inaugural leftist government, led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the National People’s Power (NPP) party.
Dissanayake’s election in September, the first presidential vote after the country’s debilitating economic crisis in 2022, marked a pivotal moment in Sri Lanka’s political history. His rise ushered in a caretaker government and the appointment of Harini Amarasuriya as the nation’s third female prime minister.
Sri Lanka has a notable legacy of female leadership. In 1960, when the country was known as Ceylon, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected the world’s first woman prime minister. She took office after the assassination of her husband, then-Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
Read here the full article published by South China Morning Post on 13 November 2024.
Image by South China Morning Post
Currently in Ghana, there are 40 females out of the 275 Members of Parliament in the 8th Parliament of the Fourth Republic. Clearly, this number is likely to decrease as some women in Parliament lost their seats during the primaries ahead of the December 7 elections.
Among them are Sarah Adwoa Safo, Dome-Kwabenya, Sheila Bartels, Ablekuma North, Gifty Twum Ampofo, Abuakwa North, Ama Pomaa, Juaben, and Freda Prempeh, Tano North.
Creating equal opportunities and ensuring that more women are represented to address the matter of underrepresentation of women in politics, policy and decision-making levels as well as in public life in general has taken centre stage in Ghana of late, especially with the passage of the Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Bill 2024, into law.
ABANTU For Development, with support from the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), is implementing a project titled, “Strengthening Activism for a Gender-Responsive Elections 2024 in Ghana”.
It convened a platform to give women parliamentary aspirants, political parties, civil society organisations, the media, and other key stakeholders the platform to discuss ways of advancing women’s participation and representation in the upcoming General Election, taking into consideration the passage of Ghana’s Affirmative Action (Gender Equity) Act 2024 (Act 1121).
Read here the full article published by Ghana Broadcasting Corporation 13 November 2024.
Image by Ghana Broadcasting Corporation
Last summer, Hanako Okada, a Tokyo lawyer and mother of two young children, started to plan a campaign for Parliament from the northern rural district where she spent her childhood. Nearly everyone she consulted gave the same odds on her chances of winning: close to zero.
As a candidate for a party in opposition, she was facing an incumbent from the party that has ruled Japan for all but four years since 1955. His grandfather, father and brother had all held seats in the prefecture before him. Ms. Okada, 44, was a political novice and a virtual stranger to locals in Hirosaki, the city in Aomori Prefecture on the northern coast of Japan’s main island that she had left more than a quarter century earlier to attend college.
Among democratic nations, Japan has one of the most abysmal records of giving women political power: Before a general election late last month, women held just over 10 percent of seats in the lower house of Parliament, putting the nation at 163rd out of 183 countries in the proportion of women in its national legislature, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a Swiss-based organization.
“I think everyone was thinking somewhere in their hearts that it would be impossible,” Ms. Okada said during an interview last week in a conference room at the telecommunications business in Hirosaki owned by her mother.
Read here the full article published by The New York Times on 12 November 2024.
Image by The New York Times
RepresentWomen tracks women's representation and leadership in the United States and around the world to identify the "best practices" for creating a more representative government. Our research indicates that even as more women run, electoral rules and systems play a major role in determining electoral outcomes. As seen in both our 2016 and 2020 reports, we find that electoral outcomes for women and people of color are overall better in jurisdictions that have implemented ranked choice voting (RCV).
The 2020 ranked choice voting report, "In Ranked Choice Elections, Women WIN" provides a thorough review of ranked choice voting in the United States and how it is impacting women's representation in the cities that have implemented it. Over the last decade, 19 cities and counties have used ranked choice voting to elect sitting city officials, including 13 mayors and the city councilmembers in 14 jurisdictions. Over the last decade (2010-2019), women have won 45% of all municipal ranked choice elections. As of April 2020, nearly half of all mayors (46%) and 49% of all city council seats decided by RCV are held by women.
Click here to see the report.
Political campaigns online have demonstrated that they can help candidates win elections, include more citizens’ concerns in political debates or allow upcoming parties to gain political exposure.
However, social media can also have a negative effect on political and electoral integrity by attacking an essential principle of democracy: the fundamental right of citizens to access trustable, reliable information to form their political opinions and, ultimately, decide their votes.
In this context of potential manipulation of public opinion through digital information operations, electoral management bodies, monitoring authorities, legislators and political parties face increasing difficulty in protecting the integrity of the political process.
Based on International IDEA’s work in Tunisia, Panama and Bolivia, this Fact sheet seeks to identify some overarching recommendations and a way forward based on how these types of activities may have potentially influenced their recent elections.
Click here to see the fact sheet.
In late 2018 and early 2019 UN Women interviewed 87 per cent of the women who ran for Parliamentary election (75 of the 86 women; of the 113 women who registered to run, 86 made it on to candidate lists). This report summarizes their stories and experiences as candidates and looks at issues of: violence against women in politics, financial constraints and campaign management, media and image portrayal, violence harassment and discrimination.
Click here to see the report.
Introduction
I was targeted because my husband is from a different community that was perceived to hold a differing political opinion from the one of the dominant community we live in.’
Survivor of sexual violence during the 2017 elections interviewed in this research Electoral-related sexual violence (ERSV) is a form of sexual violence, including rape, gang rape, sexual assault and defilement, associated with electoral processes and/or intended to influence or achieve a political end within an electoral process. In Kenya, sexual violence has been a recurrent feature of elections, which have been marred by deadly violence, unrest and serious human rights violations and abuses. Outbreaks of sexual violence during elections have been documented since the 1990s.Following the post-election violence in 2007/2008, the Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence (CIPEV), known as the ‘Waki Commission’, documented 900 cases of sexual violence perpetrated by security agents, militia groups and civilians against both men, boys, women and girls in a context of large scale violence, mass displacement and more than 1,000 deaths.
CIPEV provided critical recommendations for reform and was followed by the historic adoption in 2010 of a progressive Constitution with a robust Bill of Rights. Since 2010, an impressive set of laws, policies and standard operating procedures have been developed on prevention and response to sexual violence. Yet, during the general elections held in August and October 2017, within a context of localised violence, large numbers of cases of sexual violence perpetrated by persons in uniform and civilians were again documented. According to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), at least 201 Kenyans – most of them women and girls — were subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence; [4] however the actual figure is likely higher due to under-reporting and the fact that KNCHR documented these in 11 of the 47 counties.
Click here to see the report.
The Report on Gender-Sensitive Parliaments is the result of a two-year research project. It follows up on a previous IPU publication, Equality in Politics: A Survey of Women and Men in Parliaments (2008). That Survey had found that women were overwhelmingly the main drivers of progress in gender equality in parliament, but that parliaments, as institutions, must also shoulder their share of the responsibility. This finding begs the questions: What are parliaments doing to foster gender equality? What policies inform gender equality efforts? Are the institutional structures of parliaments around the world mindful of both men and women? In short, are parliaments gender-sensitive?
The Report seeks to provide answers to these questions. Simply put, a gender-sensitive parliament is one that responds to the needs and interests of both men and women in its structures, operations, methods and work. This publication not only provides an important assessment of the gender sensitivity of the world's parliaments, but also identifies key steps parliaments can take to become gender-sensitive institutions that contribute to the achievement of gender equality.
Click here to see the report.
Political parties act as gatekeepers, meaning that improvements in the representation of women depend on parties’ willingness to nominate women candidates. Previous research suggests that party characteristics and gender quotas largely explain women’s nominations, but overlooks the political context in which parties operate. This study highlights the gendered outcomes that occur when parties make nomination decisions in times of public discontent, namely increasing political distrust and increasing perceived corruption. We theorize that parties hold similar biases to voters: gender stereotypes that regard women as more trustworthy and honest should advantage women as political trust falls and perceptions of corruption rise. We hypothesize that parties nominate larger percentages of women in these circumstances. Using two waves of data from over 100 political parties in 18 Latin American countries, we find that parties nominate more women when a large proportion of the public distrusts the national legislature, providing support for the theory.
Click here to see the academic article.