Regendering party politics

This special issue – Re-gendering Party Politics – pays tribute to the 1993 classic book Gender and Party Politics (GPP), a collection of essays edited by Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris (Lovenduski and Norris, 1993). The aim of their volume was to explain how gender has affected party politics and how the imperatives of party politics influence the patterns of women’s political representation (Lovenduski, 1995: 3). The book offered ‘detailed and up-to-date accounts of developments in 11 countries’ and demonstrated ‘the complexity of the party systems through which feminists are pursuing political change (Party Politics)’. ¹ GPP was rightly lauded in a review published in Political Studies for establishing ‘a significant framework for future research in this underdeveloped area of political study’. Organized by country specific chapters, GPP delivered rich accounts of women’s participation in the party political process (Political Quarterly). The introduction and conclusion augmented these, having already and comprehensively informed each chapter’s approach, to provide substantial systematic comparison – in this, it was regarded as a model ‘of what an edited collection of essays of this kind should be’ (Democratization). It is no over-exaggeration to say that it influenced the subsequent generations of politics and gender scholars, a resource many of us picked up as the first port of call and an early key text for the teaching of comparative gender and politics.

Re-reading GPP, we are struck by just how much of the contemporary foci of gender and politics research – political recruitment and political careers, descriptive representation and gender quotas, substantive and symbolic representation, framing – were addressed back then in ways that revealed their interconnections rather than treating them as discrete areas of research. GPP has aged rather well. Lovenduski’s statement that (Lovenduski, 1995, cited in Krook and Childs, 2010: 83) ‘an implicit goal of feminist infiltration of parties is to secure changes in attitudes about gender, mainly by increases in understanding and awareness of gender differences and their implications for power relations’, made clear that women’s engagement with political parties was never just about the simple inclusion of women – the first dimension of feminization (Lovenduski, 2005) – but also about feminizing parties’ programmes and by implication governments, the second dimension of feminization. Diversity among women was acknowledged: Norris and Lovenduski write that ‘feminists have disagreed sharply about the nature of women’s interests’, reminding us that the recognition of women’s heterogeneity is not so very recent concern. Similarly, its reflections on the determinants of political change underpin the contemporary institutional turn (feminist and discursive) in gender and politics research. Women’s agency – or more precisely feminists’ agency – is centred (see Dahlerup and Leyenaar, 2013). As the review published in Democratization emphasized: ‘You [women] won’t get anything, if you don’t go on demanding it’. Encouragingly, GPP offered a rosy future with its ‘generally encouraging message, in highlighting women’s continuous, if uneven, political advance’.

This special issue, coming some 20 years on, explores how gender continues to fundamentally shape the formal and informal institutions, norms and practices of contemporary political parties. It reaches across country borders to explore common themes and issues. Adopting a thematic rather than country case study approach, the collection picks up on some of the key concerns of GPP, with the aim to provide comparative research in a single place.

The authors in this special issue were tasked to address some of the key concerns first identified in GPP that remain salient today in order to analyse how gender shapes parties’ form, function and activities in respect of the electorate, party ideologies, patterns of political recruitment and women’s and men’s political careers once elected. Collectively, the articles expose how parties are not gender neutral but based on a complex web of formal and informal norms and practices, the impact of which is differential for women and men and ethnic and sexual minorities (Krook and Nugent; Allen in this issue). Furthermore, the special issue foregrounds key feminist contributions to the study of party politics, with articles on gender-based political organizing (Childs and Kittilson in this issue), namely women’s sections of political parties and on the relationship of parties and women’s movements (Evans in this issue, for example). Importantly, it resists the temptation to study political parties as insular nation-state specific phenomena by studying them also in the context of European Union (EU) party politics (Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín in this issue).

In mapping and evaluating the analytic frameworks and approaches of feminist political science on political parties and party politics, this special issue offers comparative party scholars new – and we would argue – better ways to study party politics. Feminist re-conceptualizations of descriptive and substantive, constitutive and symbolic representation (Celis et al., 2008, 2014; Childs and Lovenduski, 2013; Lombardo and Meier, 2014; Saward, 2010; Squires, 2008), the notion of women’s interests and issues (Schwindt-Bayer and Taylor-Robinson, 2011), of ‘feminist’ and ‘feminized’ parties (Childs, 2008; Young, 2000) and feminist institutionalism (Bjarnegård, 2013; Kenny, 2013; Krook and Mackay, 2011) will help to capture the characteristics and features of particular parties. They should also ensure that the determinants of party and party system change are fully explicated.

Theoretically, this special issue draws upon one of the key debate that dominates the study of gender and party politics today, namely, that of descriptive and substantive representation. Women’s entry in to electoral politics as elected representatives over the last two decades – and the changing patterns in the number of women MPs across the globe – has probably been the most significant interest by gender and politics scholars. It is in the study of descriptive representation that feminist scholars have made particular progress in documenting and understanding feminized change and resistance. Single case studies abound, updated after each election, although there are some regions and countries where research is more limited. Large N studies are becoming more frequent, not least as the benefits of quantitative studies to feminist political science become acknowledged (Paxton and Hughes, 2016). In relation to descriptive representation, research variously investigates: the processes of political recruitment and candidate selection (Bjarnegård, 2013; Kenny, 2013; Norris and Lovenduski, 1995), measures to enhance and or guarantee balanced representation, especially sex quotas (Celis et al., 2011; Dahlerup, 2006; Franceschet et al., 2012; Kittilson and Schwindt-Bayer, 2012; Krook, 2009; Murray, 2010), gender gaps in voting as dynamics for greater women’s political presence (Campbell, 2006; Dahlerup and Leyenaar, 2013) and the relationship between descriptive representatives and party modernization (Childs, 2008; Lovenduski, 2005). That said, gendered inequalities in descriptive representation remain, and hence its study will continue to be a subject of gender and politics scholarship.

Substantive representation – ‘acting for women’ – is the second key strand of gender and party politics research (Celis et al., 2014). The study of the substantive representation of women frequently focuses on acts within legislative institutions. But it also takes place within parties and often leads into questions about the deeper interaction between gender and party politics and the ways in which gender affects parties as organizations and political actors, just as GPP highlighted some time ago. Women’s issues and interests (Celis et al., 2014) are shown to be addressed – frequently explicitly as well as implicitly – in party manifestos and governmental programmes and discussed in relation to internal party rules and practices. Such a feminization of parties increasingly pertains to parties across the political spectrum rather than being the reserve of parties of the left (Childs and Webb, 2012; Lovenduski, 2005; Wiliarty, 2010). Parties are found to be both gendered and gendering, as institutional sexism shapes party structures (Childs and Webb, 2012; Kittilson, 2006, 2013); their formal and informal rules and norms frequently reinforce the power of dominant players in politics, traditionally men (Lovenduski, 2005) but are nonetheless capable of being regendered (Beckwith, 2005). Newer feminist party research speaks explicitly to current comparative party scholarship, such as intra-party democracy (IPD) and party regulation (Childs, 2013a, 2013b; Cross and Katz, 2013). If anything, the substantial literature on political parties coming out of the politics and gender literature stands rather starkly opposed to the rather limited attention comparative party politics scholars have given to gender in the same time period.

At the same time, we are acutely aware of how the recent developments in gender and politics and feminist theory further expand this field of study and its methodological and theoretical approaches (Dahlerup and Leyenaar, 2013; Galligan, 2015; Randall, 2015). This indeed illustrates both the growth and the strength of the field of gender and politics. The special issue does not, most notably, address the specific issues of the decline of parties, presidentialization, parties and the media, and the rise of anti-women parties (Spierings et al., 2015). Political science remains a male-dominated and masculinized discipline, even as gender and politics scholarship has burgeoned in the last decade or so. Still, there are not enough of us to study all that we want and need to study. The study of masculinity and party politics and symbolic representation is only just, belatedly, emerging, being instigated by feminist researchers. Feminist research into party politics has the tendency to mirror more mainstream debates and often draws upon positivist and realist theories and methods to study women and gender in party politics. This has signified a paucity of studies that would approach political parties through deconstructionist or even post-deconstructionist perspectives popular in feminist theory (Kantola and Lombardo, 2017; Maiguashca et al.,, 2016). Such approaches would draw attention broader discursive contexts and sifts, and the material, emotional and affective conditions that shape gender and party politics and could help to understand, for example, the rise of the populist left and right parties in Europe.

Against the backdrop of right-wing parties increasingly making efforts to integrate women’s concerns, Erzeel and Celis ask whether ideology still counts as a reliable indicator for women’s substantive representation. Ideology remains a key explanation for women’s substantive representation, they conclude, but within the ‘left-wing’ and the ‘right-wing’ blocks there is a great deal of variety. The latter can be understood when it is acknowledged that parties from the same family can position themselves differently along various ideological dimensions. Furthermore, ideology is especially key in explaining feminist interests, but less so in the case of women’s interests.

Campbell zooms in on the linkage between parties and voters. She shows that parties’ conception of women voters and the way in which they respond to that conception is key in whether the linkage is long-lasting with the women voter seen as part of their core constituency of voters or ad hoc with women voters perceived as a ‘special’ interest group that pop on and off the political agenda. Campbell conducts two cases studies on the influence of gendered news frames on party policy and inter-party competition in the United States and Great Britain and from there builds an analytic framework to assess how parties’ respond to portrayals of women voters and why in that particular way.

Krook and Nugent analyse the selection of female and minority candidates in the British case thereby focusing in on the labour party. In the labour party, the debates about female and ethnic minority candidates have been the most extensive resulting also in the election of the most female and ethnic minority MPs compared to other parties. Gender and race interactively shape citizens’ opportunities to stand for and win election and confirm that only ‘tandem quotas’ result in positive outcomes for minority women. They hence show that enhancing group representation requires ‘multiple-axis’ thinking. Doing otherwise allows White male dominance to persist, leaving marginalized groups to fight among each other for the crumbs falling from the table.

Allen’s article continues the focus on the UK labour party in order to examine women’s participation at the executive level. Utilizing original data which track the careers of men and women from the same political generation he establishes that sex was not a driver of promotion across the period studied. In so doing, Allen challenges the discourse of the glass ceiling and points instead to the particular mix of critical actors and a political environment conducive to the appointment of more women to executive roles.

Childs and Kittilson turn their attention to party women’s organizations, little studied in the last two decades. Two competing scenarios are suggested in the extant literature: (1) that contemporary party member women’s organizations have become sites for the substantive representation of women and (2) that in an era of greater IPD and party professionalization party women’s organizations are in decline. Based on new European data, Childs and Kittilson find that almost half of the parties – notably, the traditional parties – has a party member women’s organization, refuting claims of their demise, They also find little evidence of marginalization, suggesting that party women’s organization are indeed potential sites for the substantive representation of women.

Evans focuses on the relationship between the women’s movement and political parties in the United Kingdom and the United States. In both contexts, the feminist movement has traditionally positioned themselves at some distance from political parties and electoral politics and opted for more autonomous forms of organizing. Evans draws on a qualitative interview material, showing that although some of these suspicious attitudes remain, women’s organizations also recognize the importance of working with political parties and especially with individual politicians. These engagements are strongly shaped by party ideology and the form of feminism the organization adopts.

Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín explore under researched terrain: gender and party politics in the EU. They explore the political dynamics of the European Parliament’s seven party groups in relation to two contemporary policy issues, the economic crisis and the sexual and reproductive health and rights. Their findings show that shared constructions about gender equality are issue specific and change over time. Consensus breaks down along the left right axis and, at the same time, internal divisions within party groups impact upon policy output. This helps to explain the ups and downs of EU gender policy.