The end of the all-male party? Voter preferences for gender representation in political parties

ABSTRACT

While parties have a large role in influencing the representation of women, much less is known of how voters perceive parties’ efforts to promote female candidates. Existing evidence from the literature suggests that, on an aggregate level, voters value female candidates at least to the same extent as male candidates. Meanwhile, evidence points both towards a general under-representation of women in politics as well as large differences between left-leaning and right-leaning parties when it comes to selecting female lead candidates and members of parliament (MPs). This study investigates voters’ preferences for gender representation inside political parties. Using a single vignette survey experiment in five European countries, I show that voters have strong preferences for equal descriptive representation of men and women in political parties and prefer women as lead candidates. Women have larger preferences for equal representation than men, while ideological differences are comparatively small.

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank three anonymous reviewers as well as Bruno Castanho Silva, Magda Hinojosa, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Sofia Vasilopoulou and Christopher Wratil for extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to Jan Jakub Chromiec, Lucile Dreidemy, Marion Laboure, Daniel Saldivia, and Miriam Sorace for assisting with the translations of the source questionnaire. The survey fielded for this work was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne. This paper has been presented at the 2019 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association and the European Political Science Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I include levels for both “predominantly male” and “predominantly female” MPs. Even though the share of parties with “predominantly male” MPs is clearly larger, there are in fact many cases in recent years of parties with more female than male MPs, such as the Greens and The Left in Germany, as well as parties in Spain, such as PSOE and Podemos.

2 In Germany and Spain, the survey ran from 30 November to 12 December, in France and Italy from 30 November to 5 December and in Poland from 2 December to 13 December.

3 Figure G2 in the Appendix shows the balance of covariates for male and female respondents. None of the attributes in the vignette predicted respondent gender, meaning that women on average saw similar vignettes as men. Figure G3 shows the same result for ideology.