Explaining the Dearth of Women Among Populist Executives (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Gender in Comparative Politics

Abstract

Scholars have long described populist leaders as “paternal” figures (Roberts 1995) and delighted in their overt virility, extramarital affairs, sequential marriages to former beauty queens, and even criminal sexual behaviors, all of which have been minimized as simply rude and crude authenticity (Brubaker 2017). Despite decades of research describing hypermasculinity, heterosexism, and routine misogyny among populist leaders, leading scholars of populism from Benjamin Moffitt (2016) to Michael Conniff (2010) have, amazingly, concluded that populist leadership is ungendered and equally available to men and women alike, dismissing their “bad boy” behavior as merely one example of their “low” style rather than anything inherently constitutive of populist power and thus worthy of rigorous study or analysis (Ostiguy 2009). In this paper I replicate a dataset of populists produced by Moffitt (2016), in which he holds that populist leadership is not gendered and falsely equates the likes of Sarah Palin and Pauline Hanson with Hugo Chavez and Silvio Berlusconi. Once controlled for level of office, this replication data clearly suggest that populism is not a successful political strategy for women: of the 16 populist executives identified, none of them are women, despite the fact that women hold about 10% of executive positions worldwide. Meanwhile, the three women he identifies as populists exemplify the limits of populist power for women: these women attempted to harness populist power with decidedly underwhelming results and none of them have come close to holding executive office. A second, original dataset of 87 populist executives suggests there is only one extremely partial case of a populist female executive. Drawing empirical evidence from a comparative case study of three populist presidents - Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and Alberto Fujimori of Peru – I explain the underrepresentation of women among populist executives by elucidating the mechanisms by which populism is gendered such that it is incompatible with femininity and thus female candidates. I argue that militarized masculinity is constitutive of successful populist leadership, making populism unattainable for most women. These findings demand that social scientists revisit claims that populism is, at its core, ungendered, democratic, and nonviolent.

Author

• Stacey Leigh Hunt, Auburn University