Electing Women to the Dáil: Gender Cues and the Irish Voter

Abstract

At no time in history has the number of women elected to Dáil Éireann surpassed 14 per cent of the total membership. In spite of significant social changes, the use of a proportional electoral system and no obvious bias among voters, the number of female TDs remains stubbornly low by international standards. This paper examines why, if the prospects for women's election are relatively good, so few women end up in public office. Using both aggregate and survey data, the issues of incumbency advantage, the electorate's attitudes and the candidates' differing experiences of the political process are explored. The evidence suggests that, all else equal, female candidates have as good a chance of being elected as their male counterparts, and the real difficulties in achieving equitable representation lie elsewhere, in the candidate emergence and nomination stages of the election game.

Keywords:

• women
• representation
• candidate selection
• legislative politics
• electoral systems

Notes

Further details on the measure can be obtained from McElroy and Marsh (2010). This measure is very highly correlated (0.95) with an alternative dependent variable, proportion of a quota received.

For more details, see Marsh et al. (2008, Ch. 8).

By including male as well as female candidates, however, we would have to include third-order interaction terms, which only serve to obfuscate the central findings, not to mention making an already large table of output considerably larger.

This was carried out in the Department of Political Science in Trinity College Dublin by a team of graduate students, including Laura Sudulich, Matt Wall and Jane Suiter under the primary direction of Michael Marsh. The data is lodged with the Comparative Candidate Study archive at the University of Mannheim.