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Abstract
Do women possess the requisite personal qualities and characteristics of political leadership needed by a president, characteristics that male politicians are often assumed to have? In Chile's historic 2005/6 presidential campaign, the responses of Michelle Bachelet and her male opponents to this question became an explicit area of debate. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and analysis of campaign materials, I argue that the three candidates, Bachelet, Joaquín Lavín and Sebastián Piñera, drew upon specific, if different, gendered definitions of political leadership to both present themselves as the person best qualified to lead Chile and to question their opponents' capabilities. Lavín and Piñera strategically deployed beliefs about accepted connections between men, masculinity and politics to promote their leadership capabilities and to attack Bachelet's abilities to be president. Bachelet explicitly framed her leadership style as more feminine and linked her style of leadership to her abilities to promote greater inclusion and participation in Chilean democracy. Bachelet countered her opponents' attacks on her leadership abilities by claiming that these attacks revealed the continuing resistance to women's inclusion as political leaders.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. I would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers at the IFjP for their suggestions. Susan Franceschet, Margaret Power, Claudia Mora, Lisa Baldez, Elaine Howard Ecklund, Patricia Mazon, Gail Radford and Claire Schen all provided extremely useful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
‘Elecciones Chile 2006: Debate Presidencial.’ El Mercurio. Available at www.emol.com/especiales/elecciones_debate2006/loquedijeron.htm (accessed 8 January 2007).
I conducted all of the interviews in Spanish and have provided all of the English translations for interviews and other materials originally in Spanish for this article.
Clarisa Hardy, personal interview, 6 January 2005, Santiago.
The Concertación has no legal rules governing candidate selection and has experimented with different forms of primaries (Rios Tobar 2008). Previous candidates, however, were all founding leaders of the Concertación.
Alvear was the first woman to serve as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Bachelet served first as Minister of Health, and later as Minister of Defense.
The importance of opinion polls in propelling Bachelet's candidacy was the consistent answer I was given in my interviews. This perception is confirmed by other recent work; see Huneeus and López Citation(2005); Quiroga Citation(2008); Ríos Tobar Citation(2008).
In the 2005 election, a coalition between the two smaller left political parties, the Chilean Communist Party and the Humanist Party, fielded Tomás Hirsch. He received only 5 percent of the vote and for brevity, the gendered aspects of his campaign are not analyzed.
In the CEP opinion poll, Bachelet had the clear advantage on these issues with the exception of crime (Lavín) and employment (Piñera), where her competitors were sometimes slightly ahead (CEP Citation2005).
Bachelet's strongest traits were her perceived honesty (40 percent), concern for the real problems of the country (41 percent) and common sentiment (41 percent). On the other hand, Piñera's strongest personal characteristics were his capacity to make difficult decisions (30 percent), his leadership (29 percent) and his firmness in confronting pressure (28 percent) (CEP Citation2005).
María Esperanza Bonifaz, personal interview, 28 December 2005, Santiago.
Women preferred the conservative Alessandri over socialist Allende in 1958, and the Christian Democrat Frei over Allende in 1964 (Power Citation2002). More recently, women supported Lavín over Lagos in 2000 and this preference is one of the reasons why the election between the two was so close (48.6 to 51.3 percent).
Carmen Dominguez Espinosa, personal interview, 30 December 2006, Santiago.
Alvaro Undurraga, personal interview, 4 January 2006, Santiago.
Danae Mylnar, personal interview, 5 January 2006, Santiago.
See statistics from the Gobierno de Chile (http://www.elecciones.gov.cl/nav_historico.html) for the presidential elections between 1989–2006.
Bachelet had received more women's votes (46.95 percent) than men's (44.8 percent), which signaled a departure from the pattern of a higher percentage of men than women voting for the Concertación. For a detailed discussion of the gender gap in 2006, see Gamboa and Segovia Citation(2006) and Quiroga Citation(2008).
Clarisa Hardy, personal interview, 6 January 2006, Santiago.
‘Continuity and Change’ was one of Bachelet's campaign slogans in the first round. The slogan captured the idea that she would both continue the successful programs of out-going President Lagos (continuity), but would also be Chile's first woman president and represented a new approach to politics.
Belgica, personal interview, 2 January 2006, Santiago.
Monica Silva, personal interview, 7 January 2006, Santiago.
Personal interviews with Flor Lorca, Alicia Tudela and Olivia Gonzalez on 2 January 2006, Santiago; Fanny Pollarrolo, 4 January 2006, Santiago.
Fanny Pollarrolo, personal interview, 4 January 2006, Santiago.
A special poll undertaken by polling firm Adimark after the 27 February earthquake and before Bachelet left office on 11 March showed that Bachelet's approval ratings had not changed from an earlier poll. Eighty-four percent of Chileans approved of Bachelet's presidency, with even higher numbers stating that Bachelet was liked (96 percent) and respected (92 percent) by Chileans (see Adimark Citation2010).
