Political Parties
This story was originally published by The 19th.
State legislatures craft most of the laws passed in the United States and serve as the main pipeline for higher office. But sexual harassment in state politics “remains a systemic and ongoing issue affecting both parties,” according to a recent report from the nonpartisan National Women’s Defense League (NWDL), first shared with The 19th.
“Our latest research reinforces what we already knew: the problem of sexual harassment in statehouses is pervasive, damaging and covered up,” said Emma Davidson Tribbs, the NWDL’s co-founder and director. “These abuses of power that not only inflict trauma, but impede policy making, waste taxpayer resources, and disproportionately impact the leadership of women and minorities in government.”
NWDL published its inaugural report, “Abuse of Power: Uncovering a Decade of Sexual Harassment in State Government,” which tracked allegations over a 10-year period beginning in 2013, in November 2023. The updated report, released earlier this month, identified 400 allegations of sexual harassment against 145 sitting state lawmakers between 2013 and 2024. The report tracked 11 new public allegations against lawmakers in 10 states in 2024 and included four allegations inadvertently omitted from the 2023 report. The number of actual incidents is likely three times higher due to underreporting, the report said.
Public allegations of sexual misconduct against state lawmakers peaked at the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017 and 2018, leading to new protections and policy changes in some states. NWDL was founded in 2022 to track, research and develop solutions to the pervasive problem of sexual misconduct in the halls of power.
There are over 7,300 state lawmakers serving in 99 state legislative chambers throughout the United States. State legislatures are largely self-governing bodies, and even after a spate of post-#MeToo reforms, many lawmakers surveyed said the mechanisms for reporting misconduct in their states are lacking.
Read here the full article published by Stateline on 27 March 2025.
Image by Stateline
Issues Surrounding the Quota System in Local Taiwan Government
Days before the second session of the 11th Legislative Yuan (立法院) came to a close, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, 民進黨) lawmaker Fan Yun (范雲) drew attention to the role of women in Taiwan politics when she called upon both women’s groups and fellow legislators to enact changes to Taiwan’s Local Government Act (地方制度法). The request was that the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee (內政委員會)—which is tasked with monitoring administration policies of the legislative and executive bodies—propose amendments that would raise the existing male-to-female ratio within municipal elected bodies from 1:4 to 1:3. (Article 33 of the Act currently calls for a woman representative or councilor for every four seats in special municipalities, counties, cities, and townships, but no clear formula if there are fewer than four seats.)
The Act, which was last amended in 1999, was forward-thinking at the time. However, as Fan Yun pointed out, the law didn’t guarantee the presence of women in smaller municipal or local councils which hold fewer elected seats, and this has translated into all-male representation in local governments. Radio Taiwan International reports that as many as 40 constituencies in 135 council districts have no women in office. Because of this, amendments to the Act would bring a better gender balance to Taiwan’s governing bodies—one that is already reflected among representatives from Taiwan’s urban centers.
Kaohsiung City Councillor Cherry Tang (湯詠瑜) has commented that, “The quota system has been instrumental in securing the presence and representation of female voices in politics over time, [and] I think it has led to a significant increase in female representation. For example, [and] according to my understanding, in the central level, Legislative Yuan, women currently make up around 40 percent of the members… I think these figures reflect the positive impact of [the] quota system in paving the way for women to participate actively in [the] decision making process.” [1]
That a gender divide exists between male and female politicians here in Taiwan might come as a surprise—even to those who follow Taiwan politics closely. After all, Taiwan did have Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who served two terms as president from 2016 to 2024. Its electorate has also chosen two women to serve as vice president: Annette Lu Hsiu-lien (呂秀蓮) from 2000-2004, and Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), elected in 2024. Further, as of January 2024, 47 out of 113 elected members in parliament—or about 41.59 percent—are women. Hsiao has since called for that figure to rise to 50 percent.
Click here to read the full article published by the Global Taiwan Institute on 19 February 2025.
Image by Global Taiwan Institute
Senior journalist Asma Shirazi on Sunday denounced a persistent harassment campaign targeting her and other female journalists, saying “enough is enough”, as prominent media figures endorsed a petition by the Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) calling for an end to organised harassment by political parties.
The petition has so far been signed by over 60 figures in print, television, and digital media.
Speaking to Dawn.com, Shirazi said that political parties have executed targeted harassment campaigns against female journalists for some time now, stating that the petition by the DRF showed that these campaigns will no longer be tolerated.
“I have been made a target several times,” she said. “I’m made a subject of discussion to intimidate and threaten others.”
Read here the full article published by The Dawn on 12 January 2025.
Image by The Dawn
Malta leads the EU in disagreeing that measures such as the gender quota system can solve the underrepresentation of women in politics, despite having a gender quota system itself.
This emerged from a Eurobarometer survey on gender stereotypes, which asked if “temporary measures (eg quotas) are necessary to overcome the existing underrepresentation of women in politics”.
At 62 per cent, Maltese respondents registered the highest disagreement with the statement, significantly above the EU average of 36 per cent.
Just over a third of Maltese respondents agreed with this statement, below the EU average of 55 per cent.
Malta is one of 13 countries in the EU with systems to try to ensure gender balance within national elections. The results of the study could suggest Maltese citizens are unsatisfied with its system, which has been in place since 2021.
Read here the full article published by the Times of Malta on 18 December 2024.
Image by the Times of Malta
In a dramatic shift in India’s electoral landscape, political leaders are increasingly vying for women’s votes through financial aid and empowerment schemes, sidelining the caste and religious agendas that typically dominate campaigns in an effort to woo a growing voter bloc seen as crucial for election success.
On Thursday, Arvind Kejriwal, embattled leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party) which governs Delhi state, became the latest to join the trend by announcing a Mahila Samman Yojana (Respect for Women Programme) that would give 1,000 Indian rupees (US$12) each month to all women over 18. He has also promised to double this amount if reelected.
Observers view this initiative as a strategic effort to counter Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has not governed Delhi since 1998.
Kejriwal’s new initiative seems to borrow from the BJP’s own playbook, that contributed to their unexpected electoral success last month in Maharashtra, the state that houses Mumbai, India’s financial capital. The BJP’s approach included a programme that promised monthly payments of 1,500 rupees to women from families earning less than 250,000 rupees a year.
Read here the full article published by the South China Morning Post on 13 December 2024.
Image by the South China Morning Post
How do you boost women’s representation in government, ask Jay Euijung Lee and Martina Zanella? Simple gender quotas risk being gamed, for instance by parties fielding women in unwinnable constituencies. The key, they suggest, involves distinguishing between two different kinds of discrimination faced by women in political careers.
In the pursuit of women’s representation in government, gender quotas of various kinds have been adopted by over 130 countries. However, simply implementing quotas is not enough to guarantee meaningful change. Political parties and voters may resist quotas, especially when biases against women’s competence in politics are deeply entrenched. Our recent study shows that even in such settings, however, quotas can gradually reduce these biases if they are designed appropriately.
Our case study is municipal council elections in South Korea. Since their inception in the 1990s, these councils have been overwhelmingly male-dominated, with women making up a mere 2% of elected officials. On top of this, 60% of Korean respondents in the World Values Survey of 2005 agreed that men make better political leaders than women. To combat this gender imbalance, a quota was introduced in 2006 along with wider reforms to the electoral rules for these elections…
Read here the full article published by LSE Inequalities on 27 November 2024.
Image by LSE Inequalities
Taking the opportunity provided by its 2017 review of political party strengthening, "Reflect, Reform, Re-engage: A Blueprint for 21st Century Parties," NDI has revised its long-standing Win With Women political party assessment tool, including by adding guidance on measuring levels of and dealing with the violence that women members face within their parties. The No Party to Violence: Political Party Assessment includes survey, focus group and in-depth interview tools to be used with women and men in the leadership and membership of parties in order to develop action plans to root out the violence targeting women within their own political party.
Over the last year, this new approach has been piloted with a number of the larger political parties and civil society in Côte d’Ivoire, Honduras, Tanzania and Tunisia. The outcomes from this piloting represent the first assessment of women party members’ experiences of violence within political parties, thus providing important new insights on the phenomenon, which has never been systematically studied previously. It offers a unique cross-country analysis of the current understandings and perceptions of men and women party members around the types, levels, and impact of violence against women within these institutions. This important information is being used to create party- and country-specific recommendations to improve awareness, action and accountability to end violence against women within political parties, thereby strengthening women’s membership and their roles on a basis of enhanced equality. The piloting process has also created a safe space for multi-party dialogue in ways which have not exposed any party to the political risk of negative commentary from the issue being aired in public and/or used by their competitors.
This report provides a preliminary analysis of the topline findings from the surveys of men and women party members in the four countries. This briefing will be followed by an analysis of the accompanying focus group and in-depth interviews that were carried out as part of the No Party to Violence: Political Party Assessment pilots.
Click here to read the report.
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.
Click here to read the paper.
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.