Do party primaries punish women? Revisiting the trade-off between the inclusion of party members and the selection of women as party leaders

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of party primaries on women’s chances of winning a leadership contest in eight Western parliamentary countries since 1985. By doing so, we revisit an ongoing debate about a possible trade-off between the democratic values of ‘inclusion’ of party members and ‘representation’ of excluded groups that this type of selection method may involve. Using an original data set consisting of 608 candidates who participated in 168 leadership mixed-gender contests at the national or regional level, we show that female candidates perform worse under party primaries. This finding holds even after controlling for the type of candidate competing. We therefore sustain the argument that this leadership selection mechanism, in its current format, involves a trade-off between ‘inclusion’ and ‘representation’.