We March, She Runs: Feminists Movements and Women’s Political Representation

• In Event: Women's Movements and Organizations

Abstract

What is the effect of feminist grassroots mobilizations for women’s political representation? New research explores the impact of the U.S. Women’s March on women's descriptive representation. Yet, for a worldwide phenomenon, we ignore how the effect of feminist mobilizations on political representation travels to multiparty systems. This paper sheds light on this by focusing on the 2018 and 2019 Women’s Day protests in Spain, which gathered around five million people and witnessed unprecedented female mobilizations. Combining geographical data on protests and administrative data on candidate lists at the municipal level, we explore the effects of Women’s Day mobilizations on the selection of female politicians. Taking advantage of the variation in the intensity and the geographic distribution, we use a difference-in-differences design to examine protests' effects on party nominations of female candidates, their positioning on the lists - either as a front-runner or a second – and the mechanisms behind this. This paper contributes to the literature on social movements and political representation by presenting novel evidence on the different strategies that parties may incur when facing the salience of feminist movements.

Authors

• Alba Huidobro, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

• Nerea Gándara Guerra, European University Institute