Women's Electoral Participation in Egypt: The Implications of Gender for Voter Recruitment and Mobilization

Abstract

To what extent do gender considerations impact voter recruitment strategies in Middle Eastern elections? Based on an examination of voting behavior in Egypt, we find that clientelist voter recruitment tends to empower women economically rather than politically as elections provide an opportunity for disadvantaged women to sell their vote to local vote brokers or offer their vote to a local patron in exchange for a future payoff. In contrast, women who vote for Islamist candidates may be able to increase the influence of their political support by creating common knowledge about the popularity of their candidate and by reducing the effectiveness of government repression. Most studies of women's political participation in the Middle East focus on the problem of low levels of female representation in government, and more particularly, in elected parliaments. This line of research considers the structural and cultural conditions that make it difficult for women to be nominated as candidates and to win political office as well as the behavior of female parliamentarians once in government.1 The question of how everyday women respond to the opportunities and incentives presented by parliamentary elections has been largely ignored, however, in favor of studies of the political prospects for female elites. In particular, current studies fail to investigate the extent to which gender considerations impact voter recruitment strategies in competitive parliamentary elections. This article seeks to fill this gap in the current literature by examining the actions and motivations of everyday women as political actors. In particular, we examine women's electoral participation in the 2005 parliamentary elections in Egypt in an effort to understand how women's political participation can lead to certain types of economic and political empowerment.2 The 2005 parliamentary elections in Egypt provide a crucial case for the study of gender and political participation in the Middle East for a variety of reasons. First, these elections were highly competitive and local press reports suggest that female voters may have been pivotal in determining the outcomes of many races. In addition, Islamist candidates associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood fielded candidates for about 30% of available seats and won in more than 60% of these contests. This suggests that the 2005 election was also of particular importance for our understanding of Islamist mobilization tactics as they relate to gender. Using behavioral evidence, press and academic reports, as well as information from interviews of parliamentary candidates and other political activists, this article argues that voters in Egypt, including female voters, typically fall into one of two categories. The first are individuals who expect to get a direct or indirect material benefit for their vote via local clientelist networks.3 The second are those who are ideologically motivated and turn out to support the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. In both cases, the recruitment strategies of political operatives are highly influenced by gender considerations. For candidates that operate within clientelist networks, the votes of women may be cheaper to purchase than the votes of men since the opportunity cost for voting may be lower for women, who tend to be in the formal labor market at lower rates than their male counterparts. For these women, voting becomes a kind of low-level economic activity consistent with arguments put forward by previous scholars who have described how economic opportunism can lead to forms of empowerment for low-income women in Egypt.4 For Islamist activists, women also may be targeted voters, though for entirely different reasons. Women have proven to be highly effective political recruiters for Muslim Brotherhood candidates. In addition, high turnout of veiled voters at women's polling stations creates common knowledge about the popularity of Islamist candidates in a particular district, and the presence of female activists cuts down on the likelihood and effectiveness of government repression. …