Gender, Candidate Selection, and the 2016 Irish General Election

In recent years, researchers have focused on the continued “descriptive under-representation” of women in elected assemblies throughout the world, including Ireland.¹ The term descriptive representation refers to the extent to which those elected to public office mirror the electorate they represent in demographic and social terms.² The persistent underrepresentation of women in political offices is no small matter, for it suggests women’s voices are not important and discourages women from participating in civic life. In addition, there is considerable evidence that the presence of women in public office makes a substantive difference in terms of what constituencies receive attention and what types of laws are passed.

For most of the twentieth century, Dáil Éireann included few women, and those few were mostly widows and daughters following in their male relative’s service. The percentage of Dáil seats women held grew in the 1980s but did not exceed 10 percent until the 1992 elections, when the percentage of women reached a new high at 12 percent. Women’s descriptive representation in the Dáil grew minimally over the next two decades, reaching 15 percent immediately prior to the 2016 election. A growing body of evidence suggests that women’s underrepresentation in the Dáil is not explained by voter discrimination or by the lack of political ambition on the part of women.³ Rather, the challenge to women achieving elected office lies in the candidate selection process.⁴ In Ireland, as elsewhere, it is men who predominately emerge as party candidates and who thus are elected to parliament.⁵ In order to promote a more inclusive candidate pool, Ireland adopted a gender quota that incentivizes political parties to produce more gender balance in party tickets for Dáil Éireann. Specifically, the Electoral (Amendment) (Political Funding) Act of 2012 required at least 30 percent of party nominees be female and at least 30 percent male. Parties not meeting the minimum gender balance requirements would lose half of their state funding.

In the 2016 election, the first held under the new quota, the percentage of women candidates nearly doubled and the percentage of women elected to the Dáil increased by nearly one-half (see Table 1). Given the results, there is reason to believe that the gender quota has ushered in a new era in women’s descriptive representation in Ireland. In addition, the 2016 elections present an opportunity to assess how Irish political parties responded to the new incentives and how the resulting changes in the candidate recruitment process contributed to greater levels of electoral success for women. Although parties reacted differently to the mandated quota, all parties met the minimum threshold. Controversies emerged in the candidate selection process in 2016, but the quota seems likely to continue increasing women’s representation in future Irish elections.

Gender quotas have become common in states throughout the world and can take a variety of forms, depending on the electoral system. The most effective means of assuring gender balance in national parliaments are in Proportional Representation (PR) systems that use party lists. In these election systems, party lists are proportional, and parties can list male and female candidates in an order that ensures that women meet the minimum threshold required by the electoral law. In district systems, like the United States and the United Kingdom, achieving gender parity is much more difficult; national parties may not control who is nominated in a particular district or constituency, and they definitely do not know which candidates from their party will win. The Irish electoral system is a Proportional Representation system, but it utilizes the Single-Transferable Vote method rather than a party list. In the Irish system, national parties have some control over the nomination of candidates, but cannot control or guarantee which of their candidates will win election.

Table 1.

Women Candidates and TDs at Elections, 1973–2016

The Irish gender quota adapted in 2012 further requires that the threshold is to increase to 40 percent seven...