Candidate Gender Selection and Competitiveness

• In Event: Electoral Systems, Parties, and Representation

Abstract

Women have been consistently underrepresented in the political arena. This article examines how district competitiveness affects parties’ gender candidate selection. Examining the so far unstudied “horizontal laws,” we argue that parties tend to nominate female candidates in districts that they perceive as less competitive due to their gendered perceptions of women. In particular, we posit that when parties lack the organizational structure to incorporate and recruit women into their ranks, party leaders are more likely to hold gendered perceptions of women candidates, and these have a weaker negotiation capacity in the candidate selection process. We test this theory using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that leverages an electoral law on horizontal parity recently introduced in Mexican states. For each party, the state’s electoral institute ranks the municipalities and legislative districts to the state house according to the party’s previous electoral results and divides them into three blocks of competitiveness: high, medium, and low. According to the law, parties must nominate the same number of male and female candidates in municipalities (and districts) within each block. This results in municipalities (and districts) with virtually the same previous electoral performance allocated to different blocks of competitiveness. This setting lets us (1) causally investigate whether parties are less likely to nominate female candidates in municipalities (districts) labeled as less competitive; (2) explore the mechanisms driving the effect; and (3) examine its broad consequences for accountability and representation.

Authors

• Gustavo A Guajardo, Rice University

• Lucia Motolinia, Washington University in St Louis