CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Bornat, Marleen |
|---|---|
| Title | Women to the Rescue - Is There a Glass Cliff in Politics? |
| Summary | Over the past decade, organisational research has found that women do not only face invisible obstacles as they climb up the career ladder, but that, even when they shatter the glass ceiling, they tend to be preferentially selected to precarious leadership positions. This phenomenon has been called the "glass cliff," alluding to the idea that women are perched on an (invisible) cliff and may fall off at any point. This thesis contributes to the existing research by examining whether women also face a glass cliff in the political sphere. More precisely, I argue that women are more likely to be selected as local and national party leaders when a party has been performing poorly in previous elections. However, I expect the glass cliff effect to vanish when female leaders are associated with that poor performance. To test these hypotheses, I use archival data on national party leaders in fourteen countries as well as data from an experiment on Amazon MechanicalTurk on local party leader elections. The generalised estimating equation models (GEE) of the archival data do not provide sufficient evidence for the existence of a glass cliff. Only the percentage of female politicians in a country increases the likelihood of having a female party leader. I am also unable to replicate the glass cliff phenomenon with the experimental data. The analysis of variance only indicates a significant difference in the choice of party leaders between men and women, but that effect is not dependent on the performance of a party. |
| Supervisor | Duman, Anil |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/bornat_marleen.pdf |
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