Gendered parties and gendered voters in Hungary? “Plus ça change, plus c’est pariel”

ABSTRACT

The article compares parties’ candidate selection strategies and voters’ electoral response to female candidates in Hungary. The analysis covers five elections (2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018) that is a period which offers broad variation in partisan, institutional, and even in systemic terms amongst the static and low level of descriptive female representation. Although parties continue to deprivilege female candidates they do it in varying manners and degrees. The article will broaden the demand aspect of the demand and supply model placing parties’ candidate selection in a complex institutional context. The article also demonstrates stability in voters’ electoral gender response, namely non-discriminatory behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Party nomination
• gendered parties
• women in SMDs
• voter gender bias

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Although out of the time frame of this analysis by 2020 MSzP introduced dual (female-male) party leadership.

2 We applied mainly quantitative methods and descriptive analysis to present the candidate selection of each party. All figures and tables are based on data from the official site of the National Election Office. The table in the Appendix about the structure of candidates’ selection contains descriptive data of the nomination of women: their share among all candidates, share of female SMD candidates and of the mixed female candidates among a party’s all candidates.

3 For example, in 2014, when the share of female mixed candidates increased suddenly, the share of female candidates running in SMD was only 2.2 percent in Fidesz and all of them were nominated on list – which is 11.3 percent of all female candidates. In contrast, 16.7 percent of LMP female candidates ran in SMDs and 95.7 percent among them had placement on list as well – which is 66.7 percent of the party’s all female candidates.

4 8-percentage-point was the average excess vote share above which the party possessing the SMD did not change at the next election.

5 Electoral volatility indices: 2002: 18.2, 2006: 8.4, 2010: 35, 2014: 9.9, 2018: 13.3 (Enyedi and Benoit 2011, 20 and own calculations).

6 They did not include Hungary in their analysis being short of list electoral data at the SMD level.

7 Until 2010 in relation to the party’s territorial list votes, afterwards to national list votes. The former electoral system ensured parliamentary seats from three tiers: in SMDs and on two list-tiers (territorial lists and a national list) Between 1990 .and 2010 most of the female MPs obtained the seat from the territorial lists, but this proportional tier was abolished by the modification of the electoral system in 2011.

8 Before 2010: share of votes in the first round of election.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund under [Grant number 128833].

Notes on contributors

Adrienn Vajda

Adrienn Vajda works as a researcher at the Office of the National Assembly in Hungary and participates as a Post-Doc at Department of Political Science at Corvinus University of Budapest.

Gabriella Ilonszki

Gabriella Ilonszki is Professor of Political Science and Professor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.