How Women Win and Lose Presidential Elections in Latin America

• In Event: Gender and the Executive Worldwide: Voters, Candidates, and National Leaders

Abstract

This paper is part of a book manuscript on how women win presidential elections in Latin America. I introduce a two-stage model of women’s presidential victories: Stage 1 refers to parties’ nominations and Stage 2 considers the general elections. This paper illustrates the model’s implications with the case of the 2008 elections in Paraguay. Blanca Ovelar’s candidacy enables me to show how the theory can explain not only women’s victories, but also their losses as nominees of major parties. It also shows how the theory can apply to contexts of fragile democracies.
Regarding the former, the theory rests on the three-level concept of parties’ gendered incentives. This refers to how party selectors consider candidate traits when deciding who to nominate for president. Party selectors may be sitting presidents, party elites, or mass-level militants, and their goals may relate to winning the election, building the party brand and, in the case of outgoing presidents, preserving their legacies. Selectors choose nominees who seem to convey the traits needed to achieve these goals.
Novelty and moral integrity are two traits routinely linked to women in presidential politics, in part due to their historical marginalization. Selectors face incentives that are gendered feminine when they calculate that they need certain traits, such as novelty and moral integrity, to realize their electoral, party-building, and legacy objectives.
Selectors’ perceptions of partisans’ ability to credibly convey these desired qualities also matters. In the presence of feminine incentives, party selectors will only opt to back a woman only if she is viewed as capable of outperforming other possible contenders on these same traits. The relevance of perceived potential helps explain why selectors chose some women over other women as their nominees.
Turning to the general election, Stage 2 of the model draws on accountability theories to explain outcomes of presidential races: once women are nominated by a major party, citizens’ satisfaction with the incumbent party consistently predicts women’s victories and losses. For example, when citizens are generally satisfied with the incumbent’s performance, women backed by incumbent parties remain well-positioned to win the presidency. When this is not the case, women backed by such parties become more likely to lose.
The present paper applies this two-stage model to the case of Blanca Ovelar in Paraguay in 2008. How did Ovelar win the highly coveted nomination of the incumbent Asociación Nacional Republicana (ANR), one of the oldest parties in Latin America? How did she then lose the presidency in April 2008 to former priest Fernando Lugo?
I argue that understanding how Ovelar won the nomination requires examining how ANR selectors’ missions to maintain power and build the party’s brand aligned with traits and symbols associated with women in politics: novelty, modernity, and moral integrity. I trace these alignments in three steps. First, Paraguayan leaders for years had viewed modernization—that is, development and democracy—as a national priority. Newspaper archives and my personal interviews with Ovelar, Lugo, and former President Nicanor Duarte show how ANR selectors viewed the rise of the former bishop as a threat to the party’s hegemonic position. ANR selectors watched Lugo from the beginning of the 2000s use his identity as an outsider priest to craft an image as a morally upright, empathetic leader who prioritized poverty issues. His strategy of tapping into his experiences as a former bishop was viewed as highly effective against a national backdrop of strong religiosity and trust in the Catholic church. Third, I examine discourse of ANR leadership in 2007, captured in newspaper archives, to show how despite some dissent, they decided they needed a candidate who could compete with him on these attributes.
These alignments between ANR selectors’ goals and the traits of novelty, modernity and moral integrity opened opportunities for the emergence of a woman nominee, but selectors’ perceptions of candidates’ potential to convey desired attributes also mattered. I use newspaper archives capturing ANR selectors’ discourse, my personal interviews with Duarte and Ovelar, and polling evidence to understand perceptions of her strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis her partisan competitors who were all men.
I finally explain how in the context of a hegemonic party in decline, citizens’ dissatisfaction with the ruling party largely spelled Ovelar’s defeat. I use LAPOP data from February-March 2008 to statistically model vote intention for the ANR’s presidential candidate. Results are consistent with my argument that citizens’ discontent with the ANR’s performance in the presidency provides a powerful, parsimonious account of Ovelar’s defeat.
This paper contributes to the literature on women, gender, and presidential elections in Latin America.

Author

• Catherine Reyes-Housholder, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile