Ashe, Jeanette

The year 2010 constituted a favourable opportunity for the greater descriptive representation of women in the UK Parliament. The parties were publicly competing over the issue; Parliament had its own Committee looking at it; and there were plenty of vacancies for candidates in each of the parties’ held seats, as many more MPs than usual stood down. The outcome was disappointing. There was an overall increase in the number of women MPs – up from 128 to 142 – but this was only a 2.5 per cent increase on 2005. Inter-party differences remain. The Liberal Democrats witnessed a decline in the number and percentage of their women MPs and candidates; the Tories saw a doubling of their number, with women now constituting 16 per cent of their parliamentary party; and Labour has both the largest number and percentage of women MPs. These patterns are best explained by the parties’ different attitudes towards equality guarantees – measures that, all other things being equal, return women MPs to Parliament. In other words, Labour's All Women Shortlists once again delivered. The other parties’ efforts were simply less efficient at translating women candidates into MPs. Looking to the future, the picture is far from rosy. The Coalition's plans for political reform will likely increase competition for selection at the next general election to women's detriment, and the impact of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority raises the possibility that their supply might decrease too.

The 'secret garden of politics' where some win and others lose their candidate selection bids and why some aspirant candidates are successful while others fail has been an enduring puzzle within political science. This book solves this puzzle by proposing and applying a universally applicable multistage approach to discover the relationship between selection rules, selectors' biases, aspirants' attributes, and selection outcomes. Rare party and survey data on winning and losing candidates and insider views on what it takes to win a selection contest at multiple selection stages are compared and used to reveal the inner workings of the secret garden. With a primary focus on the British Labour party over several elections, the findings challenge many long-held assumptions about why some aspirant candidate types are successful over others and provides real-world and controversial solutions to addressing women's and other marginalised groups' descriptive underrepresentation. As such, it provides a much-needed fresh look at party selection processes and draws new conclusions as to why political underrepresentation occurs and should inform policies to remedy it. Part of the "Routledge studies on political parties and party systems" series. From publisher description.

Presented at the <a href=http://www.ecpg.eu/">ECPG (European Conference on Politics and Gender)</a>, in Uppsala, Sweden (June, 2015). The proportion of legislative seats held by women and minority groups in most countries rarely, if ever, equals the group’s proportion of the population. Most scholars agree disproportional seat distribution is caused by the skewed composition of candidate pools put forward by political parties during elections. Scholars disagree whether unrepresentative candidate pools are caused by too few candidates of a certain type coming forward to participate in the process (supply) or by party selectors preferring some candidate types to others (demand). This paper draws upon British Labour party data from the 2001, 2005, and 2010 General Elections to explore supply and demand during each of the seven stages of Labour’s candidate selection process. Tests performed on data from 4622 aspirant candidates reveal women, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME), and disabled people are underrepresented in Labour’s candidate pools, which is caused by a lack of demand by local party selectors rather than an undersupply of these candidate types. Regression modelling of 44 variables drawn from survey data provided by 566 aspirant candidates more sharply focuses on the idea that party selectors prefer “ideal” type aspirant candidates. While these tests confirm a lack of central party selector preference toward the ideal type they confirm local party selector preference for aspirant candidates with certain ideal traits. Moreover, local party members are much more likely to select men over women in open, non-all women shortlist seats, which strongly suggests Labour retain or even expand guaranteed seats for women and perhaps initiate similar measures for disabled people. The same might be considered for BAME aspirant candidates, although it appears living locally is a much more important trait to local party selectors than race. The paper further provides a framework and methodology for analyzing selection outcomes in the lead-up to the 2015 British General Election.

No established liberal democracy has achieved sex balance in its national legislature. Scholars agree skewed candidate pools put forward by parties during elections cause sex-disproportionate seat distribution, but disagree as to whether disproportionality is caused by too few women aspirant candidates coming forward (supply) or party selectors preferring men (demand). This paper uses a multistage method to explore supply and demand during the British Labour party's candidate selection process. Rare data from three elections and 4622 aspirants allow for an unobstructed look inside the secret garden of politics and reveal the party is not fully feminized insofar that women aspirants are disproportionally filtered out of its selection process and are disproportionally underrepresented in its candidate pool. Testing reveals a lack of selector demand for women aspirants has a greater impact on women's underrepresentation than an undersupply of women aspirants, a finding which supports using sex quotas to level imbalanced candidate slates.

Presented at the <a href="http://www.ecpg.eu/2017-conference.html">ECPG (European Conference on Politics and Gender)</a> in Lausanne, Switzerland (June, 2017). Canada ranks 64 of 193 countries (IPU, 2016) with women making up 26 percent of its members of parliament. Upon winning the 2015 general election Canada’s new Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau made international headlines by appointing the nation’s first federal sex-balanced cabinet; when asked ‘why’ he replied ‘because it’s 2015’, which went on to become the widely trending #BecauseIts2015 and Facebook meme. Trudeau soon declared himself a feminist and his as the party for feminists. Yet Canada’s parliament may not be what it appears. For example, Trudeau’s feminist government recently rejected a private members’ bill designed to incentivize parties to run more women candidates. The media and activists have referred to the bill as the first piece of feminist legislation to be introduced in the current Parliament. Trudeau missed the vote and the Status of Woman minister along with 78 percent of the Liberal caucus voted to defeat Bill C-237 when it came forward after second reading. After a year in office, the Trudeau government continues to describe itself as feminist, but has thus far done little to advance policies that would lead to gender equity. This paper uses interviews with Canadian MPs to explore the concept “gender sensitive parliaments” using Canada as an example of the tension between rhetoric, symbolism, and legislative action.