Incumbent Parties and Women Presidential Candidates

• In Event: Gender Dynamics in National Political Leadership: Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Chief executive offices, particularly the presidency, remain one of the most powerful and male-dominated political arenas in the world. Previous scholarship has argued that understanding how women access executive positions requires systematic research on party selection (Hinojosa 2012; Bjarnegård and Kenny 2016; Pignataro and Taylor-Robinson 2019; O’Brien 2015). Contributing to this body of work, I argue that parties’ incumbency status can influence whether they support women for president. I specifically contend that although they still tend to nominate more men than women, incumbent parties face greater incentives than challenger parties to support women presidential candidates (Reyes-Housholder and Thomas 2021).

I maintain that party selectors prefer presidential candidates with traits that they believe will help them win more votes. Thus, parties in general are more likely to nominate women for president when selectors believe that their party’s weaknesses align with women’s stereotypical strengths. Two traits routinely associated with women in presidential politics are novelty and moral integrity. Because of women’s historical marginalization, women presidential candidates can often signal change and symbolize renewal (Murray 2010; Schwindt-Bayer and Reyes-Housholder 2017). Women’s historical marginalization and maternalism can move citizens and selectors to stereotypically associate women with moral integrity, or a reduced likely to engaging in corruption (Reyes-Housholder Forthcoming).

I analytically divide all parties competing in presidential elections in 18 Latin American parties from 1990-2024 into two groups. First, “incumbent parties” hold presidential power or participate in coalitions that do so. Second, “challenger parties” refer to all other parties or coalitions that compete in presidential elections to unseat those in power. The incumbent party or coalition usually puts forth only one presidential candidate (who can be the sitting president), while challenger parties and coalitions each put forth different candidates for president.

I argue that incumbent parties are more likely than challenger parties to perceive a need to project novelty and moral integrity in order to win the next presidential election. First, because these parties hold power, their selectors may be concerned with offering the electorate something new to justify their continued rule. Moreover, selectors of incumbent parties are less preoccupied with signaling experience than selectors of challenger parties because they have already been governing. Thus, the costs of nominating women over men are reduced in the case of incumbent parties.

Second, incumbent parties are more likely than challenger parties to be accused of corruption than challenger parties. This is because in-power parties have greater access to government resources than challenger parties. Because of this, selectors of incumbent parties are more likely to perceive that they need to signal moral integrity to the public to win the next election. Both these lines of reasoning motivate the paper’s hypothesis that incumbent parties thus are more likely to nominate women for president than challenger parties.

This paper tests this main prediction on a dataset of all presidential candidacies in 18 Latin American countries from 1990-2024. Results show that holding constant contextual and relevant party-level factors, incumbent parties indeed are more likely than challenger parties to nominate women for president.


I then explore the causal mechanisms of this relationship through qualitative process tracing of “positive” case studies of incumbent parties that geographically span the region. Drawing on national media coverage, I show that party selectors of the Asociación Nacional Republicana in Paraguay in 2007 and of the MORENA party in Mexico in 2023 perceived that they needed to signal novelty and moral integrity in those years, but not in the prior or subsequent presidential election cycles. I moreover show that they associated women presidential nominees–Blanca Ovelar in the case of Paraguay and Claudia Sheinbaum–with both those traits.

This paper contributes to research on candidate selection, gender, and executive politics in Latin America.

Author

• Catherine Reyes-Housholder, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile