Political Parties
Thousands Join to Boost Women’s Participation in Politics
Ahead of Iraq’s upcoming parliamentary elections in November, women politicians and political activists have launched the Arab country’s first women’s political party. After two years of waiting for official licensing approval, the al-Mawadda Women’s Party has issued a platform that seeks to unite women across Iraq and increase their political participation. Al-Mawaddah is an Arabic term from the Qur’an, symbolizing compassion, love, and respect. Jihan al-Taei, the secretary-general and founder of the party, said to Rudaw, “Women constitute more than half of Iraqi society. Our party was established due to the marginalized role of women and their genuine exclusion from all areas of life, especially from decision-making.” Per Iraqi law, at least one-third of a political party’s membership must be male. With over seven thousand members across Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, Taei will rely on “people’s belief” of women’s role in decision-making to garner more support. To campaign, the party has begun organizing programming, including awareness workshops and an online portal for media membership.
BAGHDAD — Iraq has witnessed the establishment of its first women’s political party, named the al-Mawadda Party, in an initiative aimed at unifying the efforts of women from various communities and sects, and enhancing their role in political life.
The founding conference of the party was held with broad participation from both women and men. Participants affirmed that the party would serve as a platform for empowering women and involving them in decision-making processes, driven by the urgent need for all segments of society to contribute to building Iraq’s future.
The establishment of the Al-Mawadda women’s party is considered an important milestone in the journey of Iraqi women, and a significant step that emerged from extensive discussions, workshops, and women-led meetings that sought to create real space for women in the political landscape.
Full article available here.
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Myllene Bosibori's political journey exposes deep gender, ethnic, and financial barriers facing Kenyan women candidates.
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Sexual harassment, biased systems, and economic hardship continue to block women’s fair access to political leadership.
When Myllene Bosibori decided to run for Kajiado North MP in 2022, she never thought it would be an uphill task.
However, her experience was not horrifying. Having come from the minority ethnic group, Myllene tells the Nation that she faced double discrimination of coming from a small ethnic group and being a woman. She recounts how on many occasions she was told to go seek elective politics in her native Kisii region.
Myllene also bitterly recalls how she was asked for sexual favours and a bribe to be given a ticket for one of the popular political parties. “When I refused, it was handed to another person. It is so hard for a woman seeking political leadership to fairly compete with men.”
Full article published by Nation Africa here.
Image by Nation Africa
The conservative Protestant party SGP has again voted down a proposal to formally recognize women’s eligibility for political and administrative roles, maintaining a decades-long stance that continues to limit women's participation despite previous legal rulings and internal activism.
On Saturday, party delegates overwhelmingly rejected a motion to enshrine in the party’s core statutes that women are welcome to hold political or leadership positions. The vote ended 299 to 53 against the proposal. Only party delegates were allowed to vote, not the broader membership.
The proposal was submitted by Lilian Janse and her local chapter in Vlissingen. Janse became the first woman to hold office for the SGP in 2014 when she joined the city council. Despite that milestone, the party's founding regulations still state that women who enter politics are acting "in conflict with their calling."
Stem op een Vrouw (Vote for a Woman) director Devika Partiman responded to the vote by urging women within the party not to give up. “There is no magical formula, but things really will change eventually,” she said. Partiman said she was not surprised the proposal was rejected, but she did not expect the margin to be so wide. She pointed out that only designated male delegates — often strict followers of party rules — were allowed to cast ballots. “That is the biggest problem,” she said.
According to Partiman, many regular SGP members support changing the party statutes, making the outcome “regrettable.” She added, “It would be a good idea if the men who do agree with the changes would speak out publicly, so there are visible role models.” However, she acknowledged the difficulty, noting that speaking against the leadership might hurt their own prospects in the party.
Full article published by the Netherlands Times on 24 May 2025.
Image by Netherlands Times
Labour has cancelled its national women’s conference and restricted all-women shortlists as it awaits full guidance from the equalities watchdog, drawing criticism from transgender rights and gender-critical campaigners.
The party’s governing body, the national executive committee (NEC), met on Tuesday to sign off plans to cancel the women’s conference, which was due to take place before the party’s annual conference in Liverpool in September.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s interim advice, published after the supreme court decision that the term “woman” in the Equality Act refers only to a biological woman, has suggested that voluntary organisations should apply that rule.
The NEC had been told the party was at risk of a legal challenge if it went ahead with the conference, according to LabourList, and could face protests and direct action if the conference proceeded as usual on the basis of self-identification.
Full article published by The Guardian on 20 May 2025.
Image by The Guardian
Nigerian women across different social statuses have been urged to become more politically conscious and actively involved in partisan politics as the next general elections in the country draw closer.
They were encouraged to take action during a one-day summit held in Lagos on Tuesday, organised by the Women Environment and Youth Development Initiative (WOYODEV), a non-governmental organisation focused on women and youth matters.
The forum, themed “From Margins to Mainstream: Empowering Women for Political Participation in Nigeria,” brought together scores of women and young girls from diverse backgrounds and political parties, including those living with disabilities.
Speaking at the event, the convener and executive director of WOYODEV, Mrs Tosin Apiriola-Ajayi, emphasised the importance of the summit, outlining three major objectives.
According to her, the summit aims to promote strong and sustainable feminist movements and coalitions to foster the active participation of women in politics, challenge social norms—including gender discrimination—that often relegate women to the background in political power sharing and decision-making, and empower women to take leadership roles.
Full article published by MSN on 15 May 2025.
Image credits: Tribune Online
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.