scholarly journals Opening Up the Black Box: Gender and Candidate Selection in a New Era

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meryl Kenny ◽  
Tània Verge
Keyword(s):  
Party Politics ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Gender Quotas ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
New Era ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Secret Garden ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Recent global developments, including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas, have transformed the ways in which parties and legislatures operate. This introduction to the special issue ‘Candidate Selection: Parties and Legislatures in a New Era’ puts these recent developments in context, making the case for revisiting the ‘secret garden’ of candidate selection in light of this ‘new era’ in politics. It sets out a critical dialogue between party politics and gender politics scholarship and points to the need for more research on how political parties facilitate or block women’s access to political office. Building on the burgeoning research on gender and political recruitment, it outlines how a gendered and institutional approach allows us to retheorize candidate selection processes and opens up new avenues for empirically examining the pathways prior to election. The article then introduces the papers in this special issue and concludes by evaluating the main implications of gendering analyses of candidate selection and party politics more broadly.

scholarly journals Introduction

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (04) ◽  
pp. 746-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meryl Kenny ◽  
Tània Verge
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Gender Quotas ◽  
Gender And Politics ◽  
Social Bias ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Recruitment ◽  
The Secret Garden

Twenty years ago, Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski published the classic workPolitical Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament(1995), one of the most comprehensive accounts of legislative recruitment thus far. Seeking to explain the social bias evident in legislatures worldwide, Norris and Lovenduski focused on the central role of political parties, arguing that the outcome of parties’ selection processes could be understood in terms of the interaction between thesupplyof candidates wishing to stand for office and thedemandsof party gatekeepers who select the candidates. Indeed, in most countries, political parties control not only which candidates are recruited and selected, but also are the central actors involved in adopting and implementing candidate selection reforms such as gender quotas. Yet, two decades later, systematic studies of the “secret garden” of candidate selection and recruitment have been few and far between in the gender and politics literature. It therefore seems a particularly appropriate time to revisit the core preoccupations, puzzles, and challenges that remain in the field of gender and political recruitment.

Party organization and gender in European elections

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 675-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea S Aldrich
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Gender Quotas ◽  
Selection Procedures ◽  
European Elections ◽  
Party Strategy ◽  
Promote Gender Equality ◽  
Level I ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Elected Office

Political parties often monopolize the flow of politicians into elected office making it important to understand when, and under what conditions, parties are more or less likely to promote gender equality in representation. This article argues that party choices to nominate women in elections are conditional on the centralization of candidate selection within the party. Gender quotas and characteristics of the electoral environment have differential effects on candidate lists across party types. Leveraging data at the party level, I test when it is electorally feasible and organizationally possible for parties to nominate women for office. I find that candidate selection procedures condition the effects of party strategy and characteristics of the electoral environment on the percentage of women on electoral lists. The results provide insight into how strategic party choices, attenuated by electoral considerations and organization, impact the diversity of representation in political institutions.

Political Recruitment and Candidate Selection in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Siavelis ◽  
Scott Morgenstern
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Inclusive Processes ◽  
Recruitment And Selection

Candidate recruitment and selection is a complex and opaque process that drives political outcomes and processes. Further, the process of candidate selection is notoriously difficult to study because of its informal nature, the multiplicity of actors involved, and because politicians may prefer to obfuscate their motives when asked about their decisions. Still, the literature has made advances in understanding recruitment and selection (R&S) and this article explores this crucial and understudied topic with respect to Latin America. Much literature has considered the importance of political institutions to candidate selection, but these explanations alone are insufficient. Analyses of political institutions have significantly advanced in the region, but in isolation, their explanatory power can fall short, as evident in examples where similar institutional frameworks yield different outcomes . This suggests the need to include informal processes when analyzing candidate recruitment and selection procedures. Then, armed with a more complete understanding of the processes, we can better assess the impacts of candidate choice on political outcomes. There is extensive work on recruitment and candidate selection in Latin America that focuses on executives, legislators, and gender. Each of these themes provides multiple examples of how outcomes are determined through a combination of formal institutions and informal practices. . The region’s politics have been trending towards more formal, open, and inclusive processes. This is largely a result of the belief that there is a crisis of representation for which parties are to blame. Reformists have thus championed more inclusive selection processes as an antidote to the problem of low-quality representation. By themselves, however, these reforms are insufficient to enhance the quality of democracy and they can have high associated costs for the democratic system. Therefore, the multiple consequences of the R&S process—intended and hidden—should raise caution for scholars and reformers.

Women, Politics, and Gender Quotas

1970 ◽  
pp. 18-27
Author(s):  
Valentine M. Moghadam
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Gender Quotas ◽  
Arab Region ◽  
The World ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Quota

The argument for gender quotas – made by women’s rights activists across the globe has come about in response to women’s continued collective marginalization from political power. According to data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005), the global average for women’s parliamentary representation is 18 percent, with high rates in the Nordic countries, Rwanda, and Argentina, and low rates in the Arab region and Iran.In the vast majority of countries, political power – legislative, juridicial, and executive rests in the hands of men. In recent decades, therefore, the worldwide growth of a population of educated, employed, mobile, and politically aware women, combined with the diffusion of the UN-sponsored global women’s rights agenda, has increased calls for women’s political participation and representation. One of the mechanisms to realize this objective is the gender quota. Feminist groups around the world favor the implementation of the gender quota – which may come in the form of a constitutional quota, an electoral quota, or a political party quota – but it remains both controversial and elusive, especially in the Middle East.

scholarly journals Electoral Institutions and Women’s Representation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael FitzGerald ◽  
Melody E. Valdini
Keyword(s):  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Descriptive Representation ◽  
Gender Quotas ◽  
Electoral Institutions ◽  
Women's Representation ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
The Impact

While there are many factors that drive women’s descriptive representation (i.e., the percentage of women in the legislature) the electoral institutions generate some of the most powerful and consistent effects. In the first breaths of this literature, the focus was firmly on the impact of majoritarian electoral systems versus proportional representation (PR) systems on women’s descriptive representation. Since then, the literature has grown to engage broader ideas regarding the complicated nature of analyzing institutions in different cultural contexts and under different social conditions. Particularly in the later decades of the 20th century, scholars found that structural factors, such as economic disparities between men and women and the balance of women in careers that are typical paths to political office, were important to consider in concert with electoral rules. More recently, as more women gain access to the economic elite, the literature has focused more on cultural factors such as the historical legacies of Communism and the general societal reactions to women’s leadership. These non-institutional factors are now widely engaged as an important component of understanding why and to what extent we can expect an electoral system to generate a certain outcome. Beyond the impact of the electoral system itself, there is also relevant literature that engages how electoral institutions such as gender quotas and candidate selection processes affect women’s descriptive representation. There is wide variation in the design of gender quotas as well as candidate selection processes, just as there is in the design of electoral systems, and therefore a fuller understanding of the relationship between electoral institutions and women’s representation requires consideration of the interaction of candidate selection procedures, gender quotas, and electoral systems. For example, the presence of a placement mandate (i.e., a requirement stipulating where on the list women candidates must be positioned) or a decentralized candidate selection process each has a different effect on women’s representation in an electoral system that includes a preference vote. The sections below highlight some of the existing literature on electoral institutions and their impact on women’s descriptive representation. This is by no means an exhaustive list but does offer insight into the general themes and research areas that are common in this field of study.

Gender Quotas in Ireland

2021 ◽  
pp. 576-594
Author(s):  
Fiona Buckley ◽  
Mary Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Proportional Representation ◽  
General Election ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Gender Quotas ◽  
Single Transferable Vote ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
The Law ◽  
Gender Quota

This chapter considers the implementation and effect of legislative gender quotas in the 2016 general election, a first for Ireland and a first for the proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote electoral system (PR-STV). It focuses on political parties and examines how they integrated the formal gender quota law into their candidate selection processes. Particular attention is paid to whether the law changed existing candidate selection practices, many of which are guided by informal candidate selection norms, such as a preference for incumbents and those exhibiting localist traits. The chapter concludes that the gender quota law did engender change in the candidate recruitment, selection, and election of women, but, as scholars of feminist institutionalism would describe, the change was ‘nested’ and ‘bounded’ within existing practices surrounding candidate selection, thereby denting but not dismantling the gendered norms of this process.

scholarly journals A Comparative Analysis of Selection Criteria of Candidates in Belgium

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Vandeleene ◽  
Emilie van Haute
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Selection Criteria ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Green Party ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
The Secret Garden ◽  
Design Selection ◽  
Party Institutionalization ◽  
Formal Rules

The literature on candidate selection has focussed extensively on the degree of inclusiveness and decentralization of the selectorate, as part of the debate on intra-party democracy. However, much less attention has been paid to the degree of openness of candidacies, or selection criteria within parties. Yet parties have a lot of leeway in how they design selection criteria internally. Which guidelines do parties follow when making the crucial choice on which candidates to select for elections? This paper investigates selection criteria from two perspectives: the formal rules set by parties that restrict the candidate’s pool and the (informal) preferences of selectors that shape who gets selected. We aim first at contrasting the degree of party institutionalization and parties’ formal rules in candidate selection and so, we shed light on whether parties formalise their candidacy requirements and candidate selection processes to the same extent as other party activities. Second, the paper investigates the role of the selectorates, and how selectorate’s characteristics matter for the kind of (informal) selection criteria, be they intended at maximizing offices, votes or policies. Drawing on party statutes coded in the Political Party Database (PPDB) and 23 in-depth interviews with selectors, we study three francophone Belgian parties that differ both in terms of inclusiveness of the selectorate who has the final say on candidate selection and in terms of degree of centralisation, and in terms of party institutionalisation: the green party (Ecolo), the socialist party (PS), and the liberal party (MR). Our comparative analysis of parties, selection criteria provides new insights into the secret garden of politics and highlights in particular the major impact of parties, degree of centralization.

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