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Keeping women in their place? The prevalence of gender role attitudes among local party chairs in Flanders

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Abstract

The underrepresentation of women in elected assemblies is one of the fundamental problems modern democracies struggle with. This paper focuses on party selectors as one of the core actors on the demand side. By exploring which Flemish local party chairs hold conservative or progressive gender role attitudes, this paper moves beyond the formal dimensions of the political recruitment process. Our results demonstrate that although conservative gender role attitudes are only to a limited extent present among the Flemish local party chairs, there remains a significant part of the local chairs that does not fully endorse the idea that political responsibilities should be equally shared between men and women. Overall, male party chairs and rightist party chairs have more conservative gender role attitudes than their female and leftist counterparts. Taken together, our results suggest that in some parties, conservative gender role attitudes held by the party elite could help to understand the barriers faced by female aspirants, candidates and politicians alike.

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Notes

  1. The semi-closed lists provide voters the opportunity to either vote for an entire list (casting a list vote) or they can choose for one or more individual candidates on that list (casting preferential votes). Candidates who receive enough preferential votes to pass the electoral threshold get elected automatically. Other candidates can complement their pool of votes by making use of the list votes, who are distributed to candidates according to their order on the list, as determined by the party. Moreover, the number of preferential votes a candidate receives is still first and foremost determined by a candidate’s list position (Wauters et al., 2014).

  2. Respondents were asked whether they had a party executive committee and if so, how many persons seated in this committee, and how many of them were female.

  3. Respondents who indicated they had another function (e.g., communication officer) where excluded.

  4. Respondents were asked whether they had a party executive committee and if so, how many persons seated in this committee, and how many of them were female.

  5. When looking at the effect of age as a numeric variable, similar patterns emerge and the differences are only significant for the Family dimension as well. The same occurs when party selectors are divided in five age categories (< 35, 35–45, 45–55, 55–65, > 65).

  6. When looking at the effect of the percentage of women in the local executive committee as a numeric variable, no significant effects appear either.

  7. Also linear regression models were computed for these dimensions. The significant effects in these models were identical to those presented in the logistics regression models, with the exception that they did not show a significant difference between party chairs younger than 45 and older than 65.

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Funding

This research was made possible by two Research Grants of the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) (Project number 52108 and Project number 12ZZ821N). The funders were not involved in the development of the study and the article.

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  1. Ghent University, Universiteitsstraat 8, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Robin Devroe & Sigrid Van Trappen

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Devroe, R., Van Trappen, S. Keeping women in their place? The prevalence of gender role attitudes among local party chairs in Flanders. Acta Polit 57, 472–488 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-021-00204-9

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