Constraints on Female Populist's Path to Executive Office

• In Event: Executive and Ministerial Leadership

Abstract

Scholars have long described populist executives as paternal and delighted in their overt virility, extramarital affairs, and sequential marriages to former beauty queens. Even criminal sexual violence against women has been dismissed as evidence of their rude and crude authenticity, one example of their “low” style rather than anything inherently constitutive of populist power. Instead, political scientists insist that populist leadership is a gender-neutral mobilizing strategy, equally available to men and women alike. Yet a replication dataset of Moffit (2016) controlled for electoral success and an original dataset of 47 populist executives from 1990-2020 indicate that women are notably absent from the ranks of populist executives, despite the fact that women held approximately 10% of executive positions worldwide during that time. Why are women more underrepresented among the ranks of populist executives than among executives writ large? This article studies six female candidates or executives who deployed populist mobilizing strategies, but failed to garner or sustain broad support, win election to executive office, or consolidate power once there: Sarah Palin (US), Pauline Hanson (Australia), Marine Le Pen (France), Pia Kjaersgaard (Denmark), Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina), and Chandrika Kumaratunga (Sri Lanka). Gendered tropes available to women in politics – as sexual icons, mothers of the nation, or relatives of a famous politician – are incompatible with the establishment and exercise of the militarized masculinity constitutive of populist executives.

Author

• Stacey Leigh Hunt, Auburn University