CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Zorigt, Burtejin |
|---|---|
| Title | The Receptiveness of Political Parties towards Women: Understanding the Impact of Candidate Selection Procedures |
| Summary | This dissertation argues that conventional explanations about the impact of electoral systems or culture on women’s underrepresentation in politics, not only fail to account for all observed variation in the explanandum, but do not leave enough space for policy interventions either. The reason behind this is that institutional changes, for example, in the electoral system, are rare and may be politically costly to many powerful actors, while changing political culture takes a long time. In contrast, revising and changing the political parties, and in particular, their candidate selection procedure, is not a hopeless undertaking, as political parties are goal-oriented organizations and can be carried out in a shorter time frame. It is also often in line with their ideology or political interests to support women’s political representation. The main argument here, therefore, is that the role of political parties needs to be examined if a stronger representation of women in parliament is a goal. The dissertation relies on a mixed-method research, featuring semi-structured interviews, surveys, document analysis, and quantitative data analysis. The analysis is based on a cross-national and cross-party dataset on the one hand and a Hungarian case study on the other. I analyze the candidate selection procedure from three perspectives: centralization, inclusiveness, and institutionalization. The reason why I focused on these variables is that they are general and can be applied to any selection procedure. On addition, they allow placing parties along a continuum of variables, comparing different parties and countries, and tracking and measuring changes over time in the candidate selection procedure. The results show that although the candidate selection procedure may at first appear to be gender-neutral, its impact on women and men candidates is different. Parties with inclusive, decentralized, and institutionalized candidate selection procedures have more women candidates than parties with exclusive, centralized, and non-institutionalized candidate selection procedures. I also tested this result through a quasi-natural experiment in Hungary, where I examined the effect of party primaries on women’s political representation. The results confirm that primaries, as an example of a decentralized, inclusive, and institutionalized candidate selection procedure, do not bring an immediate breakthrough for women’s political representation. Still, they seem to be more beneficial in this respect than candidate selection without open primaries. The dissertation also demonstrates a significant gap between the formal structure of parties and how candidate selection takes place in practice. The interviews’ results suggest that the parties function in a more informal manner that is less inclusive of women and thus disadvantages them in the candidate selection procedure. In line with feminist institutionalism, the thesis supports the claim that parties should be treated as gendered institutions. |
| Supervisor | Gábor Tóka |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/zorigt_burtejin.pdf |
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