How Women Win the (Latin American) Presidency (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: States, Feminism and Advocacy

Abstract

The presidency stands out as one of the most powerful and male-dominated political offices in the world (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995; Beckwith 2020). Presidents wield enormous symbolic and substantive powers, and presidential offices worldwide are more common than prime ministerial posts (Jalalzai 2013, 2017). Approximately 95% of presidents worldwide today are men, and the most common way to access presidential power is via a popular election. How then do women democratically win presidential elections?

Existing research coalesces around two categories of possible explanations for female presidential victories: supply/demand factors and crisis. Supply-side theories expect female presidential victories to occur more often as women gain experience in national politics (Norris and Lovenduski 1995; Thames and Williams 2013). Demand-oriented accounts suggest that women are more likely to win as citizen support for female leadership increases (Norris and Inglehart 2001). Probing these macro-level explanations, I show that female presidential victories worldwide from 1990-2020 do not consistently correlate with supply and demand measures such as women’s presence in national legislatures and national cabinets and citizens’ support for women in politics.

Next, other explanations point to how multiple kinds of crisis could create political openings for women. Jalalzai (2013) suggests women come to lead their nations during moments of regime instability. Others argue that women are more likely to gain leadership of prominent parties when such parties are in decline or facing scandals (Beckwith 2015; O’Brien 2015; O’Neill and Stewart 2009; Thomas 2018). These theories, based on experiences in advanced parliamentary democracies, nevertheless remain more helpful in explaining why women would lose rather than win a presidential race.

Furthermore, in light of this crisis literature, female presidential victories in Latin America remain particularly mysterious, as they occurred in moments of regime stability and economic prosperity (Reyes-Housholder and Thomas 2018). Women in Latin America won the presidency seven times from 2006-14 by running as candidates of incumbent parties or running for re-election themselves. Thus, during this period, it was not weakening parties but rather parties that were, by many objective measures, well-positioned for victory that decided to back women for president, propelling them to victory.

I sketch out a new theory for female presidential victories via incumbent parties. Much literature suggests female candidates are better-positioned than their male counterparts to signal novelty, feminine leadership, and moral integrity. These potentially positive notions of women in politics—in certain presidential electoral cycles and for certain parties–can overlap with traits desired in presidential candidates. The main argument of this paper is that, to win the presidency via incumbent parties, women must outperform their male counterparts on these stereotypical strengths at not only the party nomination stage (Reyes-Housholder and Thomas 2021), but also in the general election.

To illustrate some of the theory’s empirical implications, I selected two “most different” cases of first-time female presidential victories through incumbent parties: Michelle Bachelet in Chile (2005-06) and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil (2010). Because existing research suggests that parties’ selection mechanisms matter for women’s representation (Hinojosa 2013), I chose women who obtained the nomination of incumbent parties via strikingly different dynamics. Exemplifying a bottom-up emergence, Bachelet rose in national polls and then earned the Concertación’s nominee through broad-based elite consensus. In contrast, sitting President Lula threw his support behind Rousseff who much later on in the presidential campaign rose in the national polls, exemplifying a top-down emergence.

Despite these differences, I argue that key to both Bachelet’s and Rousseff’s presidential victories via incumbent parties hinges on the ways in which they leveraged their masculine credentials of presidentiality (ministerial experience), and even more crucially, outperformed their male (and female) counterparts on women’s stereotypical strengths: novelty, feminine leadership, and moral integrity. Polls and analysis captured in newspapers from the time show that Bachelet outperformed Joaquín Lavin, Soledad Alvear and finally Sebastián Piñera on the traits of novelty, empathetic and horizontal leadership. Moreover, Rousseff outlasted would-be Lula successors such as former chief of staff José Dirceu and outshone other female hopefuls such as Marta Suplicy by demonstrating both technocratic expertise as well as moral integrity.

This paper is part of a larger book project on how women win the (Latin American) presidency.

Author

• Catherine Reyes-Housholder, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile