Party Differences in Women Electoral Success in Open Ballot PR Elections

• In Event: Using Free List Proportional Representation to Examine Political Behavior

Abstract

In this paper we study inter- and intra-party differences of women’s electoral success in an open-ballot PR electoral system based on data from three consecutive Swiss elections between 2007-2015. The fact that women are still largely underrepresented in politics is undisputed. However, the reasons behind this are not so clear anymore. For a long time, women have been discriminated at all stages of the legislative recruitment process. Women faced greater obstacles then men in the nomination process, in campaigning and at the polls. This is changing. Different studies in many countries have shown that if women run, their chances of getting elected are not worse than the chances of men.
However, there are still large differences between parties and party families. Left-wing parties usually nominate almost as many men as women and they have a higher share of women in parliaments. Center-right parties on the other hand often nominate more men than women and they usually have a lower than average share of women in parliament. The reasons behind this are not fully understood so far. Is this related to the nomination process, to campaigning, or to discrimination at the polls by certain parties? To understand the inter- and intra-party dynamic is therefore important to understand the reasons behind the low level of women in parliaments.
In this paper we use data from Switzerland and explore potential discrimination of women in the electoral process. Switzerland’s open list PR electoral system is very favourable to conducting such an analysis because voters have the option to allocate preference votes to candidates within a party list through giving two votes to the same candidate and they can also delete candidate names. In addition, voters can give preference votes to candidates from different parties. This allows to analyse the gender dynamics of different type of preferences votes within each party: under what conditions female candidates gain or lose votes from own party voters and under what conditions do they gain votes from voters of other parties. Using survey data collected in the framework of the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS) allows us further to control for previous political experience and campaign activity and to take into account factors like incumbency and ballot position.
The analysis shows differences in campaign activities between men and women in all parties: Women focus their campaign more often to benefit the party instead of their own candidature and they less often hold positions in party or political offices at the lower level which could support their efforts to mobilise voters. However, we do not find evidence that this has an impact on women’s underrepresentation in the Swiss Parliament: Female candidates did not do worse than male candidates. Women even received on average more votes taking into account differences in campaign involvement and previous political experience. The advantage is not the same for all parties: Female left-wing candidates do as well as left-wing male candidates. However, within right wing parties, women often do better than men.
Overall, this leads us to conclude, that the main source of underrepresentation is not so much discrimination by voters anymore but the overall lower level of political involvement of women in politics and the internal political dynamic among centre and right-wing parties that nominate substantially fewer women than men despite their good performance at the polls.

Author

• Georg Lutz, University of Lausanne