Winnable Seats Research Articles

Inside the ‘secret garden’: Candidate selection at the 2019 UK general election

Candidate selections are seen as the ‘secret garden’ of UK politics. Hundreds of parliamentary constituencies rarely change hands, meaning that the ‘real election’ is the incumbent party’s selection process. Yet scholarship into candidate selection in the United Kingdom remains limited. In this article, we build a novel dataset of known shortlisted candidates in winnable seats to offer the first cross-party analysis of who gets shortlisted, and what factors influence success among shortlisted candidates. We find that shortlisted female and ethnic minority candidates are still less likely to be selected as parliamentary candidates, while living locally is by far the most significant factor affecting selection success. However, the nature of the 2019 snap election allowed parties to use emergency powers to advantage party insiders in late selections. We further find that, contrary to media focus, party faction was not a significant factor in Conservative or Labour Party selections.

Nancy Astor, Women and Politics, 1919–1945

Nancy Astor was the first woman elected to the House of Commons, in 1919. She succeeded her husband in his Plymouth constituency when he inherited a seat in the House of Lords, so avoided the discrimination which for decades prevented the selection of many women for winnable seats. She was not a suffragist, or, when elected, a feminist, but the hostility of many men, in and out of parliament, to her presence in the Commons stimulated her support for some, though not all, causes for which the women’s movement campaigned. She promoted equal pay, equal work opportunities, custody rights and the equal franchise, among other things, with some success, but was dubious about divorce and birth control due to her faith in Christian Science and its moral strictures. She was passionately anti-war, so like other feminists and pacifists was an ‘appeaser’. She was not a ‘crypto-Nazi’ as she was, and sometimes is, represented. She facilitated contact between women activists and MPs, male and female, and encouraged cross-party co-operation among women MPs. She was a popular and regular public speaker and widened the appeal of many aims of the women’s movement among women who were dubious about feminism. She was a Conservative who never followed the party line and an active promoter of state welfare measures, especially for young children. She was popular in Plymouth and supported her constituents through World War Two, but stood down in 1945 and left politics when Labour was likely to win the seat in the landslide election. Overall, her greatest contribution is that she significantly raised the profile of women in British politics and assisted the very gradual shift to greater gender equality and expansion of state welfare between the wars and through World War Two.

The Irish legislative gender quota: The first election

Abstract In 2012 legislative gender quotas were introduced as part of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government’s political reform agenda. The legislation specifies that payments to political parties ‘shall be reduced by 50 per cent, unless at least 30 per cent of the candidates whose candidatures were authenticated by the qualified party at the preceding general election were women and at least 30 per cent were men’. The 30 per cent gender threshold came into effect at the 2016 general election. Research demonstrates that gender quotas work to increase women’s political descriptive representation, but to do so, political parties must engage with them in ‘goodwill’, be ‘wellintentioned’ or place women in ‘winnable seats’. This article examines if this was the case at the 2016 general election. Using statistics, as well as drawing from interviews with party strategists, the article assesses the impact of gender quotas on women’s candidate selection and election. We conclude that parties did embrace the spirit of the gender quota law but resistance remains.

Party Committee Targeting and the Evolution of Competition in US House Elections

This paper examines the effects of the increased role of party organizations in the recruitment and funding of congressional candidates in the US House post-1994. The recent uncertainty over which party will gain majority control of the House has transformed the role of party organizations in House campaigns. Despite the new resources devoted to each competitive seat in the House we find minimal changes in the overall competitiveness of US House elections. Additionally, the vast majority of potentially competitive seats do not draw a high quality challenger. Our results suggest that if parties recruited more quality candidates in the full range of these conceivably winnable seats this effort could produce more competitive seats or more seat turnover in the House.

All Aboard the Pink Battle Bus? Women Voters, Women's Issues, Candidates and Party Leaders

Since at least 1997, the main political parties have made significant attempts to target women voters.1 New Labour actively sought to undermine the Conservative Party's post-war advantage among women. Labour under Blair and Brown was explicitly liberally feminist in both dimensions of feminisation—the inclusion of women in politics and the inclusion of women's perspectives and issues.2 The Party enacted legislation designed to further gender equality while using equality guarantees (in the form of all-women shortlists) to ensure the better representation of women on the Labour benches in the House of Commons. As Conservative leader since 2005, David Cameron has adopted the language of liberal feminism, stressing the need for more Conservative women politicians, and fairer access to paid employment for women.3 To understand how the parties related to women voters during the 2015 election campaign, we situate the election within this context of the interparty competition for women's votes that has gradually brought the parties closer together on ‘women's issues' such that all, with the possible exception of UKIP, are competing to be viewed as at least equally liberally feminist.4 We trace how women voters were portrayed and targeted throughout the campaign through an analysis of media accounts and party manifestos. We also examine how women voters evaluated the parties and whether the parties' equality rhetoric regarding women's political representation was manifest in their selection of women candidates in winnable seats.

Benefits and Obstacles for Women Candidates: An Account of Scottish Women Candidates' Experiences

Demand and supply side explanations are presented within the context of the political structures and electoral system. For Westminster elections in the UK, it is the party system that is central in determining whom the representatives are (Lovenduski 2001), because voters largely vote along party lines and the electoral system is based on single-member constituencies. Therefore, the selection decisions of parties, particularly for safe and winnable seats, has traditionally heavily influenced the gender makeup of the Parliament. Therefore research into women's political representation in the UK, based on the supply-demand model, has focused only on the recruitment and selection stage, whereby issues of resources, motivation, selector discrimination, and selection procedures are considered; or the period of being an elected representative, whereby adversarial politics, hours of sitting, and travelling distances are considered. There has been no

Candidate gender and voting in the 1997 British general election: Did labour Quotas Matter?

The proportion of women MPs elected in the 1997 British general election reached an historic high of 18.2 per cent, the vast majority from the victorious Labour Party. The large increase in the proportion of women Labour MPs was partly due to the policy of establishing women‐only shortlists for winnable seats. This paper examines the distribution of women candidates in the election and analyses the factors that affected the votes they attracted. The results show that Labour women selected on the women‐only shortlists attracted significantly more votes than women nominated on open shortlists. This was mainly a consequence of their selection for marginal seats, but the greater organisational effort that was concentrated on those seats was also an important factor. Overall, there was no evidence that voters discriminated against women candidates in the election, regardless of party and regardless of how they were selected. The large number of women MPs raises issues concerning the formulation and articulation of a distinctive women's policy agenda at Westminster.

Social representation

Abstract This paper examines social representation in the European Parliament using a model which uses the demand, the supply and the structure of opportunities as factors explaining differential recruitment. Analysis of the experiences of candidates suggest that supply–side factors proved more strongly related to candidates gaining winnable seats than demand–side factors. Results also confirm the importance of institutional structures in widening or narrowing opportunities, and suggest the European Parliament will remain social unrepresentative in the foreseeable future, a characteristic that serves only to add to the already considerable problems of legitimacy in the European Union.

‘How not to answer a question’ revisited

Abstract Women in politics in Australia have been in the spotlight recently as their numbers have increased over the last decade particularly with the unprecedented number of women elected in the 1996 General election and also with the 1994 promise of the ALP to increase the number of women preselected in winnable seats to 35% by 2002. Recent research on language and gender has shown that women and men use different discourse strategies when they speak and that women tend to be more ‘cooperative’ in their speech while men are more ‘adversarial’ (Tannen 1993). The context of this paper will be the highly public forum of the political media interview. The hypothesis that women avoid answering questions less than men is tested, showing that women do avoid answering questions less than men. The gendered use of different avoidance strategies is also examined but with no significant difference in the way questions are avoided. The use of prefered and disprefered answers, however, showed a gender difference with women using significantly more prefered answers than men. To define different types of answer and avoidance, the notion of topic used by Gardner (1987) and the Gricean Maxims (1975) are used.

Is the Single Nontransferable Vote Superproportional? Evidence from Japan and Taiwan

Theory: The traditional view of the single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system has been that it is superproportional-tending to produce larger seat bonuses for small parties than for large parties-because small parties face easier nomination and vote division problems than do large parties. A contrary view is that SNTV privileges governing parties by giving them superior access to particularistic policy benefits, which are useful in stabilizing both nominations and vote divisions within parties. Hypotheses: By the latter view, SNTV should lead to subproportional resultswith larger seat bonuses for large parties than for small parties-to the extent that governing parties are large. Methods: In this paper, I operationalize and test these competing claims at the district level, using both cross-tabulations and probit analysis. Results: Although there is a sense in which SNTV is superproportional, I show that two large governing parties (the LDP of Japan and the KMT of Taiwan) have been significantly more efficient at securing as many seats as possible out of a given maximum number of winnable seats, than have their respective oppositions.

The "Year of the Woman" in Context

The 1992 election saw a virtual doubling of the number of women in the U.S. House of Representatives. Although much of this may be attributed to record turnover rates, I focus in this article on whether previous explanations for the underrepresentation of women in the House still held in 1992. I find that although turnover is important, the increased probability that open-seat candidates (especially Democrats) are women is at least as important. The achievement of funding parity by women candidates and the fact that Democratic women are running for more winnable seats (i.e., those in more Democratic districts) also is important. However, an examination of the 1994 election shows some retrenchment in the percentage of open-seat candidates who are women. I conclude that 1992 is part trend and part anomaly.

The Electoral Consequences of Gender in Australia

The increasing importance of women in politics is a common feature of almost all advanced industrial societies. Women have become increasingly active in most aspects of political life during the 1970s: as voters, as lobbyists and, perhaps most significantly of all, as candidates for election to public office. The traditional prejudice against women in public life, which assumes women to be less suited to politics by temperament and training, suggests that they could be expected to receive fewer votes than men in an election. But it is unclear to what extent this prejudice has been mitigated by the broad changes which have taken place in women's roles in recent years. Can we still expect women candidates to fare less well than their male counterparts?Such eviddce as there is in Australia suggests that the parties are less likely to nominate women but that, once nominated, women candidates fare neither better nor worse than men. Sawer concludes that ‘the differential electoral fortunes of male and female candidates has always reflected the failure to pre-select women for safe and winnable seats, not any failure to win votes.’ In a similar vein Mackerras argues that ‘the average performance of women is neither better nor worse than that of men. Women will be elected when parties select them for winnable seats.’ Research in the United States and Britain also suggests that a candidate's sex does not matter: Darcy and Schramm found that sex did not matter in the United States, controlling for incumbency and party, and in an analysis of three British general elections, Hills concluded that ‘the gender of a candidate makes only a very small difference to the voters.’