Success under Open List PR: The Election of Women to Congress

Abstract

If a political scientist had to predict where women might enjoy relative electoral success in Latin America, Peru would not be high on the list. Among major Latin American countries, Peru has some of the most glaring socioeconomic inequalities, a notoriously inchoate party system, and one of the weakest recent records of democratic governance and human rights. Like most countries in the region, Peru employs party list proportional representation (PR), the most widely used electoral system in the world, to choose its national legislature. However, whereas the lists in most PR systems in Latin America and the world are closed, Peru uses an open list format. The conventional wisdom holds that open list PR is less propitious for the election of women than closed list PR. Nevertheless, this chapter shows that female candidates have enjoyed a great deal of electoral success under the variant of open list PR used in Peru.