Selecting Women, Electing Women: Political Representation and Candidate Selection in Latin America

9. Candidate Selection and Women’s Representation in Latin American Politics

9 Candidate Selection and Women’s Representation in Latin American Politics For women, it’s pretty much a constant that they’ll have this deep-rooted reluctance to promote themselves, because they think it’s “in poor taste” and because they are afraid to be thought of as ambitious. For this reason, they avoid demonstrating their interest or lobbying on their own behalf, and they prefer to wait to be asked to be candidates. —María Fernanda Cañete, “las vicisitudes de la aplicación de la cuota electoral en los partidos políticos” There is a serious problem and that’s that even though women are very well prepared [to enter politics], the parties are not preparing women [for candidacies]. —susana villarán de la puente, mayor of lima (quoted in alberto adrianzén, Juan rial, and rafael roncagliolo, Países andinos: Los políticos) T his book began with the stories of Cristina Fernández’s and Michelle Bachelet’s paths to the presidencies of their respective nations. These accounts illustrate that candidate selection is instrumental to understanding women’s representation: the selection stage can be more important than the election stage. Candidate selection is important. selection processes are “not simply arcane details of a political system: they affect the substance of politics through their effect in determining who will (and who will not) govern the country” (Morgenstern and siavelis 2008: 391). as demonstrated in the previous chapters, selection procedures have enormous effects on women’s abilities to become candidates and officeholders. 152 Chapter 9 By using data from across latin america to assess the viability of arguments that “there just aren’t enough qualified women” (supply side explanations ) and that “voters just won’t cast their ballots for women” (demand side explanations), i demonstrate that women’s underrepresentation in politics is caused by bottlenecks at the candidate recruitment and selection stages. The two dimensions that i have used to categorize candidate selection (exclusivity versus inclusivity and centralization versus decentralization) determine the types of obstacles that potential female candidates will face. selection processes are grouped into one of four types on the basis of their position along these two dimensions: inclusive-centralized, exclusive-centralized, inclusive -decentralized, and inclusive-centralized. exclusive processes avoid self-nomination, and centralized selection moves decision making away from local power monopolies. By circumventing the two most important hurdles that potential female candidates face, selection processes best characterized as dedazos often prove advantageous to women. On the other hand, selection methods that are inclusive and decentralized can be problematic because they force women to put forward their own candidacies and advantage members of local power groups. This latter form of selection includes primaries ; although heralded as the best form of selection, such procedures can encumber women, making it difficult for them to become aspirants or candidates . processes that appear inclusive in process may not be inclusive in outcome. The cases studied in this book—the major parties in Chile and Mexico in the eight municipalities in which i conducted fieldwork—provide significant variation not only in the types of candidate-selection procedures that are used but also in results. Women’s nomination rates exhibited important variation. The empirical chapters demonstrate that efforts by the parties of the left in Chile to increase women’s representation have been undermined by inclusive-decentralized candidate selection. alternatively, the parties of the right, and in particular, the Unión demócrata independiente (Udi), have experienced unexpected success. despite lacking a desire to increase women’s representation, the parties of the right as a group saw more female nominees than the parties of the left. in the renovación nacional (rn), potential women candidates avoid self-nomination, and in the case of the Udi, women not only bypass self-nomination but also circumvent local power monopolies; as a result, these parties have managed to produce more female candidates than parties of the left. The use of inclusive-centralized selection methods by the partido acción nacional (pan) showed mixed results . The partido revolucionario institucional (pri) and the partido de la revolución democrática (prd) used a variety of selection methods across Candidate selection and Women’s representation 153 the four municipalities. although the pri and the prd also had voluntary party quotas in place, women suffered the effects of self-nomination and local power monopolies. The next section of this concluding chapter briefly turns to the case...