Abstract
The ability of women in office to inspire other women to enter politics can be an important process in undoing longstanding gender gaps in political representation. Previous research on this potential role model effect of female officeholders finds mixed results in terms of female candidacies across a wide range of contexts. Explanations for these mixed findings include that positive effects are conditional on the nature of women’s incorporation in a given context, and also suggest female incumbents can lower the perceived need/utility of more women running. I take a wider view and test for role model effects across different levels of the candidate emergence process. In doing so, I put a spotlight on a potentially pivotal variable: the role of parties and their candidate selection processes in moderating role model effects. Through a case study of Mexico, I find evidence of engagement effects among women in the mass public as well as women seeking party nominations, but no evidence for role model effects at the candidate-level (either within or across districts) in congressional elections. Using data on the candidate nomination processes of one major political party, I find evidence that party decisions in candidate selection methods attenuate possible role model effects.
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Notes
Replication materials are available via the Political Behavior Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LGWQB5.
As Lawless and Fox (2010) argue, the deficit in women’s representation is due in larger part to deficits in the number of women candidates than deficits in electoral performance compared to men. Langston and Aparicio (2011) find similar patterns in the case of Mexican legislative elections, the focus of this paper.
To further explore the potential for contagion effects, I provide a cursory analysis of Mexican legislative candidacies discussed in the online appendix and summarized in Table A12 of the online appendix. I find that contagion effects are not likely working in tandem with role model effects and in fact may work in the opposite direction.
Senior project personnel for the Mexico 2012 Panel Study include (in alphabetical order): Jorge Domínguez, Kenneth Greene, Chappell Lawson, and Alejandro Moreno. Funding for the study was provided by the Centro de Estudios Sociales y de Opinión Pública de la Cámara de Diputados (CESOP) and the Secretaría de Gobernación; fieldwork was conducted by DATA OPM, under the direction of Pablo Parás.
An alternative strategy would be to pool both men and women together and include an interaction term between gender and the indicator for a woman winning in the district. I opt for sub-setting the data in this way, which is equivalent to a fully interacted model. However, I report the results of these pooled analyses in Table A2 and Fig. A1 of the online appendix.
Documents from the party’s Electoral Organizing Committee are available at http://www.pan.org.mx/estrados-electronicos-coe-archivo/.
I do not have data on districts where the party simply designated a candidate, since there is no self-nomination by pre-candidates in those cases.
Economically active persons are defined as those who work, had a job but are not currently working, or were seeking work in the reference week.
It should be noted that given Mexico’s mixed electoral system, which distributes votes in the proportional representation (PR) tier based on votes in the single member districts (SMDs), parties and coalitions have an incentive to and do field candidates in every congressional district so as to maximize the number of votes for the larger PR tier districts.
The models in Fig. 2 are each OLS regressions of a measure of political engagement on an indicator variable for a woman winning in the legislative district, a lagged dependent variable, pre-electoral political preferences, and demographic variables, with robust standard errors. Table A1 in the online appendix summarizes the estimates and fit statistics for these models. R-squared for the models ranges from .1 to .15.
Table A3 in the online appendix summarizes the estimates and fit statistics for this model as well as the corresponding model for men.
The results for the male subsample of the interaction analysis are plotted in Fig. A2 of the online appendix.
Along with the results presented here, I also conducted an interactive analysis that substituted political information with copartisanship with the winning candidate as the moderator of interest. To the extent that role model effects are present among the mass public, one would expect they are strongest among copartisans of the winner. Indeed, I do find that the role model effect is stronger among copartisans with the winner. However, there are very few copartisans in the second wave of the panel (among women, 86 weak copartisans and 81 strong copartisans in total). I exercise caution in drawing strong conclusions from such observations. Results for this analysis can be found in Table A4 and Fig. A3 of the online appendix.
The reason the two models have a differing number of observations is because the PAN reserved some primaries for only female pre-candidates in 2015. The results here are robust to including an indicator for this reserved primary system in the model of the number of female pre-candidates. Those results are summarized in Table A6 of the online appendix.
Holding the share of neighboring women winners (t-1) at its mean value and the safe PAN indicator at its mode of zero.
I also conducted a similar analysis to the one in Table 1 that isolates for simply partisan effects. Rather than any woman winning in the district or neighboring districts, that analysis includes whether a PANista woman won in 2012 and whether a PANista woman won in a neighboring district in 2012. If partisan motivations are driving role model effects among aspirants, I should see stronger effects in this model. I find null results for both partisan role model variables. Results are reported in Table A7 of the online appendix. This indicates that it is not only PANista female winners that motivate PANista aspirants.
One possibility is that any effects of candidacies from female officeholders is entirely within-parties, rather across all parties as tested here. To investigate this possibility I conduct additional analysis only for the PAN, which is a useful case since it is the only major party in this period that did not engage in electoral alliances with other parties. I substitute the main variables of interest with an indicator of whether a PANista woman won the district and the percent of PANista women among the neighboring winners. The dependent variable has been changed to an indicator of whether the PAN nominated a woman in that election. The results, reported in Table A10 in the online appendix, show that there are no role model effects in this strictly partisan model. In fact, the effect for previous female PANista winner in the district is negative and significant at the .05 level.
Count models with the number of female candidates (rather than the share) as the dependent variable and controlling for the total number of candidates produce similar results.
The breakdown of how frequently each method was used across the 300 single member districts is as follows: Closed primary - 138, designation - 76, woman-reserved primary - 82, open primary - 4.
The share of women nominees to come out of each selection method was 18% (closed primary), 60.5% (designation), 94% (closed primary reserved for women pre-candidates), and 50% (open primary). Although women seem to perform better than prior research would expect in open primaries, this selection method was only used in 4 districts in 2015, so one should be cautious to conclude that PANista women fare well in open legislative primaries.
Table A11 in online appendix summarizes the estimates for the model used to plot Fig. 5.
Figure A4 in the online appendix plots the distribution of the PAN’s electoral performance in 2012 across the single member districts. One should note that given Mexico’s multiparty system, parties rarely receive more than 50% of a district’s votes. The first-place party in a district typically wins with a plurality considerably below the 50% mark.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers of Political Behavior for their thoughtful comments. I also thank Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Jonathan Hiskey, Joshua Clinton, Eric Guntermann and other participants at the 2018 MPSA conference for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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Castorena, O. Female Officeholders and Women’s Political Engagement: The Role of Parties. Polit Behav 45, 1609–1631 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09765-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09765-z