Rethinking the ambition gap: gender and candidate emergence in comparative perspective

Abstract

The gender gap in political ambition is often presented as an immutable fact about the political world. This special issue interrogates this fact, drawing on case studies from across the globe. Taken together, the contributions move the research agenda away from explaining why (or whether) women have less ambition than men, and towards understanding the gendered dynamics of candidate emergence. These gendered dynamics include individual, institutional and contextual factors, thus shifting the emphasis away from gender gaps and towards gendered explanations. This analysis further underscores how exhorting women to ‘lean in’ to candidacy cannot solve the problem of men’s over-representation in politics.