How to become a députée – Lean to the left: Party differences and gender parity in the 2012 National Assembly elections

Abstract

This research centers on the effects of gender parity on elections to the French National Assembly elections in 2012, with particular attention to the party differential in the success rate of female candidates. Clearly parity laws have increased the number of successful female candidates since its inception, but that this effect has been muted within one major party, the UMP, the Union for a Presidential Majority. In contrast to the Socialist Party or other minor parties, female UMP candidates fared much worse than their male counterparts, especially among their incumbent party members.

Youth without Representation

“…Because there is hardly any prior research on youth representation across parties, we consult the literature on women's representation in parties and adapt the expectations put forward in this literature to explain the presence of young adults in parties. The women's representation literature focusing on parliamentary parties (see Childs and Webb 2012;Southwell 2014;Childs and Caul Kittilson 2016) has identified several characteristics, which, adapted to youth, could also affect the extent to which parties have younger MPs in their delegations. These are the existence of voluntary party quotas, the age of the party, the size of the party in terms of electoral success, the age of the party leader, and the political ideology of the party.…”

Political Party Characteristics and Women’s Representation: The Case of the European Parliament

“…1 For the relationship between party characteristics and women's representation there is a larger literature (see O'Brien, 2018). With the help of case studies in national settings such as Canada (Bashevkin, 1993), Germany (Wiliarty, 2010), Great Britain and Spain (Kenny & Verge, 2013), Mexico (Bruhn, 2003), the United Kingdom (Childs & Webb, 2012) and France (Southwell, 2014), and through more comparative large N research (see Caul, 1999;Childs & Kittilson, 2016), the literature has mainly identified five party level characteristics that influence the election of women. The five factors are; the existence of party quotas, the age of the parties, the vote size of the party, female leadership of the party, and the party ideology.…”