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6 “Less Democratic, but More Effective” Exclusive-Centralized Selection The president invited me to participate as a candidate, but i said to him, “no, president, i can’t be a candidate. i’m just not very good at speaking in town squares.” Fujimori responded by saying to me, “Campaigns are different now. Besides, we need people we can trust in Congress.” —Martha Chávez, who later became president of the peruvian Congress (quoted in alberto adrianzén, Juan rial, and rafael roncagliolo, Países andinos: Los políticos) T hrough her own “personal force,” evita perón was able to augment argentine women’s representation in Congress, making argentina the world leader in women’s congressional representation in the mid-1950s (Jones 1996: 77). U.s. president lyndon B. Johnson significantly increased his appointment of women after hearing a woman whom he respected talk about discrimination against women (Freeman 2000). and president Carlos Menem of argentina, like his peruvian counterpart alberto Fujimori, was personally responsible for ensuring the passage of a national quota law (Jones 1996: 78). When a personal commitment to increasing women’s representation is coupled with exclusive-centralized selection procedures, women’s representation can rise dramatically. as Chapter 3 explains, personal preferences can make a substantial difference in exclusive-centralized selection. exclusive-centralized selection coupled with a bias against women would almost certainly result in fewer women candidates. However, even absent a preference for women, exclusive-centralized selection still proves advantageous to women because it allows women to avoid self-nomination and does not require that they gain the support of local power monopolies. Candidate selection is centralized when “candidates are selected exclusively by a national party selectorate, with no procedure that allows for territorial 100 Chapter 6 and/or functional representation” (rahat and Hazan 2001: 305). selection is exclusive when the selectorate is limited to include only one or two individuals . across latin america, there is “evidence of the persistence in many parties of strong tendencies toward centralized decision making” (Zovatto G. 2007: 309). determining whether parties are using exclusive selection methods is more complicated, in part because party documents may obscure who has true decision-making authority; real power can be “covered up” by formal procedures (Freidenberg 2003: 30). as Freidenberg notes, “it is very difficult to find in a party text that the election of a presidential candidate is done by a single person, like the party leader” (2003: 30). The same is often true of candidate selection for other political offices. exclusive decision making continues to exist and is most likely the norm in certain types of political parties (Freidenberg 2003).1 Geppal2 data indicate that 17 percent of the largest parties in latin america are using exclusive selection methods to select their legislative candidates (roza 2010a: 131–132), but it is likely that this figure may underestimate just how regularly this form of selection is used. exclusive-centralized candidate selection has important parallels to appointment systems. appointments are used to select officeholders for some political positions; for example, members of the judiciary and ambassadors are often appointed to their positions. These appointments are different from exclusive-centralized candidate-selection procedures in that appointments are intended to select an officeholder, while exclusive-centralized systems are used to select candidates who must then participate in an election to determine whether they will become officeholders. in appointment systems, decisions are usually being made at the top and by a small number of people, often by a single individual. Here, too, decision making can be said to be less democratic, and yet women are routinely better represented in appointed than in elected positions. The data in Graph 1.1 demonstrate as much: while women are 7.4 percent of mayors in the region and 20.5 percent of legislators , one of every four ministers in the region is a woman.3 The data in Table 6.1 show that on average women are much more likely to be represented as governors in countries that use appointment rather than election. examples of this phenomenon abound. The nicaraguan legislature is illustrative of the effects of appointment; under the sandinistas, the legislature was converted into an appointed body known as the Council of state. Women’s share of seats was 9 percent in 1972, when this was an elected legislature, and 22 percent in 1980, when councilors were appointed. The figure dropped to 16 percent , however, when the legislature was once again popularly elected in 1995 (saint-Germain and...

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