Gender and local executive office in regional Russia: the party of power as a vehicle for women’s empowerment?

Abstract

We employ a political ambition framework to study women’s under-representation in Russian local politics. We conduct a survey of current heads of municipal districts and municipal urban and rural settlements in four regions of the Russian Federation. The study reveals gendered pathways to local leadership positions. The advantage of incumbency is fully used by male politicians: male incumbents are more likely than female incumbents to run for re-election. Self-initiated ambition, term in office, and age explain the decisions of male executives to run for re-election. Female incumbents are likely to run for a subsequent term only if they are supported by the United Russia Party.

Keywords:

• Gender
• women’s underrepresentation
• political ambition theory
• local self-government
• candidate emergence
• Russian Federation
• local politics

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to recognize support from the Loyola University Chicago Internal Research Grant and thank Richard Matland, Vincent Mahler, the editor, and an anonymous reviewer for providing comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Local executive offices are referred to as local self-government institutions in the 2003 Federal Law # 131 “On General Principles of Organization of Local Self-Government Institutions in the Russian Federation” and are designed to model the European Charter of Local Self-Government.

2. It is important to note that the local level of political representation of women demonstrated one of the most dramatic changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union: women constituted up to 50% of members of the local councils under the Soviet system. Their numbers fell to a mere 9% average country-wide by 1997 (Kochkina 1999, 174, 175). The Soviet system of local councils only roughly corresponds to today’s local self-government offices.

3. This response rate is similar to the response rate in the 2008 CAWP Recruitment Study (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu 2013).

4. Other research has determined that women are more likely to respond to surveys than men (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu 2013).

5. None of the heads of city-level offices (oblast and republic capitals) responded to our survey.

6. It is important to note that the federal law pertaining to local self-government offices does not set any term limits for elective officials, and thus we do not control for term limits in this model. A large portion of our sample (50% of men and 48% of women) are serving their first term. Only two people indicated inability to run because of term limits, perhaps locally imposed, and thus they were excluded from this analysis.