Gender, Incumbency and Party List Nominations

Women are descriptively under-represented in legislatures worldwide, but women’s representation varies dramatically across parliaments. ¹ A large literature identifies electoral institutions, political party characteristics and socio-economic factors that appear to explain this variation. ² This work usually relies on cross-national – and cross-parliament – data, or over-time examinations of single countries, and evaluates arguments using aggregate measures of women’s electoral success. While this literature identifies empirical regularities in women’s representation, it has been less successful in establishing the underlying mechanisms. In particular, while many theories about women’s electoral success are grounded in the logic of parties’ candidate nomination strategies, those strategies have not, to our knowledge, been examined directly in a comparative context.

Nowhere have the limitations of analyzing aggregate patterns been more apparent than when attempting to disentangle the mechanisms underlying gender disparities in candidate nomination. Prevailing theory attributes variation in women’s descriptive legislative representation – in particular, the tendency for representation to vary systematically with electoral, party and socio-economic characteristics – to gendered candidate recruitment and selection strategies. But it has heretofore been difficult to determine whether levels of women’s representation can be explained by explicitly gender-driven selection strategies or variation in favoritism towards seated incumbents (who are historically men). Given the divergent normative implications and policy prescriptions suggested by these potential determinants of women’s (under)representation, distinguishing between these two potential mechanisms is important. Simple gender quotas, for example, may have little impact on women’s descriptive representation if incumbency is the primary obstacle, while term limits are a cure for incumbency advantage, but not explicit gender bias.

Theoretically, we argue that both mechanisms can explain the aggregate empirical record, and highlight the potential for these two mechanisms to operate both independently and in concert. Empirically, we use disaggregated candidate-level data to conduct a critical test of competing explanations for established gender patterns in candidate selection. As such, our article represents a significant contribution to the gender representation literature, and cuts to the core of the questions of when, where and why women are under-represented in legislatures and the reason women’s representation tends to grow slowly over time. Our study is the first to comparatively and quantitatively assess the simultaneous – and potentially interactive – effects of incumbency and gender bias on parties’ candidate...