Party Control and Gender Representation

• In Event: Political Parties, Primaries, and Candidate Selection

Abstract

A wide range of recent studies on race, gender and class representation have placed an emphasis on "party gatekeepers" as the main barrier to representation for marginalized groups. In this body of work, the mechanisms of how party insiders engage in gatekeeping often go unexamined. I fill this gap by drawing on a synethsis of organizational perspectives on parties and feminist institutionalist scholarship. I argue that party organizations have a "repertoire of control," a set of tools and understandings through which a range of different types of actors within political parties exert informal influences over nominations. I illustrate this argument through a mixed-methods study of nominations in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. While party insiders have traditionally used the repertoire of control to exclude women candidates, the New Brunswick Liberals engaged in a practice of "affirmative gatekeeping" to nominate party-preferred women. I support this argument with material from over 16 months of fieldwork, including participant-observation of 25 nominating conventions; 55 interviews with party insiders, nomination candidates and feminist organizations; and the creation of original datasets on nominations from political finance records, newspaper coverage and electoral data. In this paper, I make three main contributions. First, I demonstrate that the UCLA school's framework for understanding nominations can travel, with some adaptations. Second, I provide a comparative conceptual framework for understanding how party insiders engage in gatekeeping or party control. Third, I discuss the potential (and limitations) of affirmative gatekeeping as model for increasing the representation of marginalized groups within political parties.

Author

• Quinn Albaugh, Princeton University