Party Primaries and Female Representation: Too Much or Too Little Democracy?

• In Event: Consequences of African Electoral Integrity

Abstract

Women are underrepresented in parliaments across the world. A growing literature has focused on various mechanisms that limit the supply of women candidates offered to the electorate. Special attention has been paid to the way in which political parties act as gatekeepers through various candidate selection procedures. Perhaps counter-intuitively, scholars have argued that democratic selection procedures, such as decentralized primaries, are particularly disadvantageous for women. But is it really the case that “too much democracy” harms the prospects of female candidates? Analyzing primary elections in Malawi, we argue the opposite: It is not the democratic nature of party primaries per se that reduces the chance of selecting female candidate for parliament. Rather, it is the lack of electoral integrity, and thus the lack of democratic quality, within such primaries that prevent women from advancing to candidacy.

Drawing on the literature on electoral integrity, we theorize that low institutional quality will favor actors with the necessary resources to engage in large-scale manipulation. In societies with great political and economic inequities between the genders, individuals with access to such resources are predominantly male. However, where parties are successful in upholding free, fair, and inclusive primaries, the success rate of women improves.

Empirically, we focus on the case of Malawi and parliamentary party primaries prior to the 2019 election. Although important qualitative work has highlighted the widespread problem of primary election manipulation in Malawi and elsewhere, systematic data on forms of manipulation and variations in primary elections across space is lacking. To remedy this shortcoming, we introduce a unique data source, the Malawi Observation of Party Primaries (MOPP). The dataset was collected by deploying election observers within 100 randomly selected constituencies and offers detailed information on 307 party primaries with a total of 521 parliamentary aspirants. We combine the MOPP data with a telephone survey of 375 randomly selected candidates standing in the 2019 Malawi election, the Malawi Candidate Survey (MCS), as well as semi-structured qualitative interviews with primary election candidates and party leaders. Our analysis shows that less primary manipulation is associated with a higher probability of female aspirant success.

Authors

• Merete Bech Seeberg, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

• Michael Wahman, Michigan State University