Interpersonal Resources and Insider/Outsider Dynamics in Party Office

Abstract

While the multiple barriers women face to attain public office have been vastly documented, the operation of insider/outsider dynamics within political parties’ top decision-making bodies remains largely under-researched. This article provides new theoretical and empirical insights on how interpersonal resources create ingroups and outgroups in parties’ national executive committees—the body that manages the day-to-day functioning of the extra-parliamentary party organization. Our comparative analysis of Spanish political parties in the period 1975–2020 documents that interpersonal resources are unevenly distributed across gender. Most crucially, we show that these resources play out differently for women and men members, with embeddedness in party networks only helping the latter attain positional power and extend their tenure in party office. These heterogeneous effects suggest that top decision-making party bodies do not just reflect existing gender inequalities but reinforce them in significant ways, rendering women member outsiders on the inside.

Women's Descriptive Representation in Burundi: The Mixed Effects of Gender Quotas

“…The reason for these mixed effects can be found in the particular history of their adoption and the political context of their implementation, whereby the consociational power-sharing model was both helpful but also limiting. Importantly, women have been excluded from crucial formal and informal networks, which deprive them from interpersonal resources, thus making them eternal outsiders as Martinez-Canto and Verge (2023) call them. The policy implication is that for gender quotas to be a really effective tool against women's political marginalisation, the historical dynamics, the broader political context, as well as the informal practices and networks that shape power dynamics must be taken into account.…”

“…To explain why gender quotas may fall short of their immediate targets, Bjarnegård and Zetterberg advance two mutually reinforcing perspectives – one psychological, the other procedural. If women generally occupy less prestigious portfolios, this reality owes much, first, to gender-based prejudices that gatekeepers – party leaders and cabinet makers – hold against women, and, second, to the specifics of political nomination processes (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg, 2011), which generally relegate women to a de facto outsider status (Martinez-Canto and Verge, 2023). Political career makers do not entrust women with important political positions, because they consider it a strategic miscalculation for two reasons.…”