Political Parties

This paper considers the emergence of women’s parties, their nature, and development in a comparative framework. Using an original dataset derived from European electoral commissions, statistical offices, national libraries, media archives, party records, and interviews of experts from the respective countries, the author documents and describes 30 such parties contesting elections at the national level in Europe since 1987. She then conducts a series of tests on this panel data to determine when and under what conditions women’s parties are likely to emerge. The author argues that women’s parties are indications of failures of the established political parties to include and represent women’s interests. Additionally, she demonstrates that women’s parties are more likely to appear where women are empowered unevenly than where they are already included or their marginalization is consistent.

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Quotas aren't anathema to meritocracy: they increase competence levels by displacing mediocre men, write Timothy Besley, Olle Folke, Torsten Persson and iKNOW Politics Expert Johanna Rickne in their paper. The abstract is provided below.

Abstract

We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in Swedish data. We use a novel approach, based on register data for the earnings of the whole population, to measure the competence of all politicians in seven parties, 290 municipalities, and ten elections (1982-2014). We ask how competence was affected by a "zipper" quota, requiring local parties to alternate males and females on the ballot, implemented by the Social Democratic party in 1993. Far from being at odds with meritocracy, this quota raised the competence of male politicians where it raised female representation the most. We argue that resignations of mediocre male leaders was a key driver of this effect.

Click here to read the paper. 

Click here to read an LSE blog post based on the paper. 

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) has designed this Framework in order to assist political parties and gender equality advocates in their efforts to develop comprehensive policies to advance gender equality within political parties. Political parties have come to embody a central element of modern representative democracies—voluntary associations of citizens that aggregate and represent the interests of the people. Not only have they become indispensable for democratic governance, they have thus become the key gatekeepers for accessing political power and voice in governmental decision-making.

Are women in Congress really more likely than their male counterparts to work together and get things done, regardless of party lines? Or are they first and foremost partisan creatures? This Political Parity report was authored by researchers Jennifer Lawless, professor of government at American University, where she is also the Director of the Women & Politics Institute, and Sean Theriault, professor of government and university distinguished teaching professor at the University of Texas. This comprehensive study of gender and cooperation on Capitol Hill is a first cut at assessing the conventional wisdom that women of both parties are more likely than their male co-partisans to be “problem solvers” – people who create a climate for passing legislation rather than serving partisan goals. Click here to read the full report and here to watch a webinar in which the authors discuss their findings. 

The objective of this publication is to critically assess progress and efforts in advancing women’s political participation in the OSCE region. This compendium brings together existing knowledge and good practice while considering what needs to be done to promote faster progress towards gender parity in politics, and recognizing the importance of embedding those practices in the hands of the authorities of participating States.Aimed at gender experts, human rights activists, development workers, diplomats and politicians, as well as academics, the compendium uses data from published sources to identify recent trends in women’s political participation. The publication explores different aspects of participation of women by focusing specifically on political parties, elections, local politics and parliaments. Drawing on presentations from a meeting of international experts in Warsaw in May 2015, it looks at the reasons behind varying levels of representation and identifies gaps in information and understanding. Click here to read it. 

This report, published in 2015 by the International Institute for Electoral Assistance and Democracy  presents findings from a study on political party financing and equal participation of women in Kenyan electoral politics. It was conducted with the objective to assess the formal and informal barriers that women face in relation to exercising their political rights. The study specifically looks into the role and extent to which access to financial resources determines the success of women running for elective positions in Kenya. It discusses the main findings on financial barriers for women politicians in Kenya, and makes recommendations to facilitate reforms in this area.