Recent global developments, including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas, have transformed the ways in which parties and legislatures operate. This introduction to the ...special issue ‘Candidate Selection: Parties and Legislatures in a New Era’ puts these recent developments in context, making the case for revisiting the ‘secret garden’ of candidate selection in light of this ‘new era’ in politics. It sets out a critical dialogue between party politics and gender politics scholarship and points to the need for more research on how political parties facilitate or block women’s access to political office. Building on the burgeoning research on gender and political recruitment, it outlines how a gendered and institutional approach allows us to retheorize candidate selection processes and opens up new avenues for empirically examining the pathways prior to election. The article then introduces the papers in this special issue and concludes by evaluating the main implications of gendering analyses of candidate selection and party politics more broadly.
This book explores the gendered dynamics of institutional innovation, continuity and change in candidate selection and recruitment. Drawing on the insights of feminist institutionalism, it extends ...the 'supply and demand model' of political recruitment via a micro-level case study of the candidate selection process in post-devolution Scotland.
Candidate selection and recruitment has been notably described as the “secret garden” of politics—an obscure process, often hidden from view, that is regulated largely by internal party rules, ...informal practices, and power relationships (cf. Gallagher and Marsh 1988). In this contribution, we contend that informal party practices and their gendered consequences are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female underrepresentation. Rather than make a strict separation between formal and informal rules in the recruitment process, we argue that gender politics scholars must instead identify and empirically investigate the specific combinations of such rules that impact upon women's and men's political participation in parties. The proposed approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the bounded nature and variable outcomes of institutional innovation and party change.
Abstract
The U.K. Women's Equality Party (WEP) was established in 2015 to “bring about change by winning—support, votes and seats.” It has thus far recruited tens of thousands of members and run ...candidates in European, national, devolved, and local elections. This article provides one of the first empirical analyses of this new actor in U.K. politics. Adopting a feminist institutionalist lens, we examine the extent to which WEP “does things differently” by looking at its discourse, formal party rules, and informal ways of doing things “on the ground.” Drawing on a set of semistructured interviews, observations of local and national party meetings, and document analysis, we argue that while WEP has to some extent tried to set up alternative participatory structures and new “ways of working,” it has also at times fallen back on more traditional, centralized, and hierarchical modes of party organizing, as well as informal practices that are more typically associated with male-dominated parties.
Research on the 'contagion effect' suggests that the dynamics of party competition explain the adoption of party gender quotas. However, there is little systematic evidence as to the conditions under ...which contagion occurs. Based upon analysis of trends in women's political representation in Scotland 1992-2011, we ask how intra-party factors and multi-level dynamics impact on party decisions to adopt and implement gender quotas. We find mixed evidence of quota contagion across party systems or different party and political levels and conclude that multi-level party dynamics play a key role in explaining why contagion is not very 'contagious' in Scotland.
The “institutional turn” in political science reflects a wider consensus among both feminist and mainstream scholars that institutions—broadly defined as the formal and informal “rules of the ...game”—deeply shape political life. Political institutions are also profoundly gendered. Yet, despite significant advancements in institutional analysis over the past few decades, gender politics scholars continue to grapple with how to “capture” the gendered character and gendering effects of institutions. This contribution explores how insights from feminist institutionalism (see, for example, Kenny 2007; 2013; Krook and Mackay 2011) can help us address these methodological challenges. It argues that a feminist institutionalist approach provides useful insights into the gendered foundations of political institutions, the operation and importance of informal institutions, and the general and gendered mechanisms of continuity and change.
Women’s political parties are designed to increase women’s representation in politics. More than 30 have been established in Europe since 1987, yet there has been little systematic analysis of why ...and when they emerge, how they organise and what challenges they face. We argue that the study of women’s parties can offer insights into questions concerning inter and intra-party power relations and the relationship between social movements and political parties, while also contributing to broader debates around the ‘big questions’ of representation, gender (in)equality, and the dynamics of political inclusion and exclusion. This article explores these issues through a case study analysis of the UK’s Women’s Equality Party. Drawing upon original empirical research undertaken with party activists and officials, we argue that the party’s impact has been constrained by wider organisational logics and an unequal party system, while it has so far adhered to traditional (male-dominated) patterns of party organisation.
New institutionalism (NI) may no longer qualify as being ‘new’, but since re-emphasizing institutions as a central explanatory variable in political analysis over two decades ago, it continues to ...provide scholars with a useful perspective through which to analyse political dynamics and outcomes that shape everyday life. The renewed focus on institutions has rebalanced the structure/agency scales back toward the former without losing important insights about the role and impact of political actors. NI has allowed for greater understanding about the co-constitutive nature of politics: the various ways in which actors bring about or resist change in institutions; and the way institutions shape the nature of actors’ behaviour through the construction of rules, norms and policies.
This contribution evaluates the theoretical and methodological challenges of researching the gendered dynamics of candidate selection in comparative perspective. It argues that comparative studies ...should take into account not only the gendered nature of political parties and their wider institutional context, but must also investigate the informal aspects of the selection process and their gendered consequences. The article explores these dynamics by revisiting original in-depth research on the candidate selection process in two different settings – Thailand and Scotland. Using a common analytical framework, the article reflects on this work and points to two key aspects of the interaction between formal and informal rules – the gendered consequences of informal party recruitment and of local influence over candidate selection – which are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female under-representation. The article concludes by outlining a research agenda for comparative work on gender, institutions and candidate selection and pointing to future directions for work in this area.
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