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ABSTRACT
Do women’s motives for joining a political party depend on the implementation of a gender quota for party offices and electoral lists? Based on multiple waves of the German Party Membership Studies, we address this issue using survey data for about 5,000 female party members. We find that women’s probability of joining a party because of their political ambition, i.e. attaining a public or party office, slightly improves with the quota size. But more importantly, there is a robust, statistically significant interaction between the quota targets and the percentage of female party members. Women are most likely to report instrumental reasons for joining when there is a large gender gap for the party members and a quota requiring a high percentage of female office holders. These results strongly imply that women, at least roughly, calculate the intensity of the intra-party competition for political offices when deciding to join a party.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Previous research has examined not only whether factors conducive to participation are less pronounced among women, but also if there are differences in determinants of party membership between women and men. However, the classical models of political participation seem to be similarly useful to understand party membership of both gender groups (Wauters et al. Citation2017).
2. Davidson-Schmich (Citation2008, 5) addresses this issue: “Ideally, to determine whether there is a gendered political ambition gap in Germany I would have taken a random sample of all rank-and-file party members from all major parties in Germany and assessed their levels of ambition.”
3. The distinction between expressed and nascent political ambition has become widely accepted. A person is ambitious in the former sense if he or she actually runs for office, while nascent ambition is the “inclination to consider a candidacy” (Fox and Lawless Citation2005, 644). Obviously, both concepts are intertwined: Fox and Lawless (Citation2005, 644) consider nascent political ambition “a critical precursor to expressive ambition.” Investigating instrumental motives for joining the party primarily yields insights into nascent political ambition. While joining a party is indeed a first act on the way to running for office, it remains to be seen whether this will actually happen in the course of the membership. It would be desirable for a deeper understanding of gender inequalities in political participation to identify the conditions that influence how often the rather abstract desire for political office ultimately translates into candidacy. In the absence of panel data for party members, however, this remains a research gap for the time being. In addition, it is important to note that ambitions may develop over the years of membership. This could in turn depend on quotas.
4. When measuring political ambition, reduction of social desirability is always a challenge. For women, this might especially be true as even successful women tend to understate their ambition (Geißel Citation1999).
5. “Why did you join [name of the respective party]? Please indicate for each of the following reasons, how important this was for you at that time.”
6. As a proxy for a respondent’s educational degree at the time of joining the party, we use the educational level at the time of the survey. In some cases, we certainly overestimate individuals’ educational attainment because they have acquired a higher degree in the meantime. This should especially be true for those two percent of our respondents who joined while being underage. It might also be fairly common for the 15% of our respondents who were under 25 years old at the time of joining. Considering the latter, however, our operationalization mitigates the problem. Since we already assign respondents to the highest educational category when they achieve the university entrance qualification, we would not categorize respondents any differently after they completed their studies between the time they joined the party and the time they were surveyed about it. As a robustness check, we additionally estimated our models without considering a respondent’s educational level. The coefficients used to test our hypotheses hardly change at all.
7. Bündnis90/Die Grünen apply their quota rules to the national party leaders as well, resulting in a mixed-gender leadership duo. Still, there are different cases in which women became party leaders without such a gender quota (most prominently Angela Merkel from 2000 onwards). It allows us to disentangle the leadership from the quota effects, revealing that quotas are more important for the political ambition of new female party members.
8. Why are the predicted values in always negative? As stated before, our dependent variables indicate how political ambition as a reason for joining is assessed relative to the other potential motives to become a party member. The provided statements about these instrumental motives are among the incentives with the lowest agreement among respondents. Even under favoring conditions, the average assessment of an item in this item battery is more positive.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Frederik Springer
Frederik Springer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, Leibniz University Hannover. He is mainly interested in electoral systems, voting behavior, and party members. His PhD thesis dealt with the determinants of strategic voting.
Markus Klein
Markus Klein is a professor of political science at the Leibniz University Hannover. His research focuses on voting behavior, party members, and value change. He was one of the primary researchers of the 2009 and 2017 German Party Membership Studies.
Yvonne Lüdecke
Yvonne Lüdecke was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, Leibniz University Hannover, and now works as a data analyst in the private sector. Her research interests include political participation, social capital, and gender.