Project description
Checking gendered power hierarchies in politics
While the number of elected women officials is growing, there is still an important gap in political endurance with that of elected representative women tending to be significantly shorter than that of men. The EU-funded SUCCESS project will advance a novel theory of inclusion that explains gender gaps in endurance. It will provide much needed new empirical evidence on why, how and under what conditions women’s political careers are likely to endure. SUCCESS will investigate the multifaceted links between the agency of elected representatives, institutional context and popular opinions on the importance of experience and diversity in politics. Overall, the findings will shed light on why and how increased electoral volatility disrupts or reinforces gendered power hierarchies in politics.
Objective
Democracies are under pressure worldwide: The political landscape is rapidly changing, with new parties emerging and old ones suffering, as voters turn away from established parties. We also witness a significant gender-gap in political endurance, meaning that womens careers as elected representatives in parliaments tend to end quicker than mens. SUCCESS argues that questions of womens political endurance are of uttermost importance for the quality and legitimacy of democratic processes and therefore demand scholarly attention.
SUCCESS will advance a novel theory of inclusion that explains gender-gaps in endurance, and provide much-needed new empirical evidence on why, how and under what conditions womens political careers are likely to endure.
SUCCESS will investigate the multifaceted relationships between a) the agency of elected representatives, i.e. their choice of strategies to get re-elected b) popular opinions about representatives gender, political experience and their career strategy, and c) the specific institutions and contexts that underpin gender-gaps in political endurance across time, regions and political systems. SUCCESS thus offers a comprehensive perspective, highlighting the interconnections between these three aspects in a novel theory of political inclusion: Rather than focusing on what excludes women from political office, the project explores what contributes to their success.
SUCCESS will employ a unique multi-methods approach to collect data in five core country cases and a large-N dataset, including qualitative interviews, survey experiments, conjoint analysis, simulation study and anthropological film. These efforts yield unprecedented opportunities for a new turn towards understanding how gender-gaps in political endurance affect political inequalities. The project is pioneering empirical studies on why and how increased electoral volatility in new and old democracies disrupts or reinforces gendered power hierarchies in politics.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
5020 Bergen
Norway