Sacrificial lambs, women candidates, and district competitiveness in Canada

Thomas, Melanee; Bodet, Marc André

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2012.12.001

Cited by 84 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Because women are seen as weaker candidates, they may be placed in tougher districts (as sacrificial lambs) or discouraged from seeking higher office (Niven 2006;Thomas and Bodet 2013).…”

Section: The Effects Of Female Incumbencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Female Incumbency Reduce Gender Bias in Elections? Evidence from Chile

Shair‐Rosenfield

Hinojosa

2014

Political Research Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The incumbency advantage is typically thought to constrain female political representation, but can female incumbency provide a signal to parties that reduces strategic gender bias? We argue that once women prove they can win elections, parties will revise their strategic evaluations of their value as candidates. We test this using an original dataset of twenty-one Chilean elections between 1989 and 2012. We use a Heckman selection model to assess re-election rates by incumbent candidate gender, conditional on the re-nomination of incumbents. We find that female incumbents are just as likely to be re-nominated and re-elected as their male counterparts.

show abstract

“…Because women are seen as weaker candidates, they may be placed in tougher districts (as sacrificial lambs) or discouraged from seeking higher office (Niven 2006;Thomas and Bodet 2013).…”

Section: The Effects Of Female Incumbencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Female Incumbency Reduce Gender Bias in Elections? Evidence from Chile

Shair‐Rosenfield

Hinojosa

2014

Political Research Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thomas and Bodet (2013, p. 154) define sacrificial lambs as candidates who run as "mere standard bearers in riding where the party does not expect to win". The term is especially used when discussing majoritarian elections, where parties may nominate a candidate to contest a race it does not expect to win due to a strong incumbent and/or limited party support (Canon, 1993;Kaplan, Park and Ridout, 2006;Roscoe et al, 2006;Thomas and Bodet, 2013;Wilcox, 1987). The term has also been widely used in the gender and politics literature to better understand (the absence of) party support for women politicians, with mixed results (Davidson-Schmich, 2010;Dolan, 2006;Hennings and Urbatsch, 2014;Ondercin and Welch, 2009;Studlar and Matland, 1996;Thomas and Bodet, 2013;Welch et al, 1985).…”

Section: Sacrificial Lambs and Laranjas: Brazil In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extreme non-viable candidates and quota maneuvering in Brazilian legislative elections

Wylie

Santos²,

Marcelino

2019

Opin. Publica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores the causes and consequences of extreme non-viable candidacies, also known as “ laranja ” (orange) candidacies in the Brazilian political lore. We first define and delineate what makes a candidate a laranja, engaging the comparative literature on sacrificial lambs and using district-level electoral results to operationalize the concept. We then advance a typology of laranjas with four ideal types that vary along dimensions of legality and intentionality. Next, we apply descriptive statistics and a hierarchical logistic regression model to explore the individual, party, and district-level characteristics of extreme non-viable candidates and assess whether and how laranjas are distinct from non- laranjas. Finally, we illustrate the gendered character of laranjas, documenting how the candidate gender quota law in Brazil has been associated with a proliferation of candidatas laranjas (women extreme non-viable candidates).

show abstract

“…More generally, women face tradeoffs between family balance and competitive professional environments (Bertrand et al (2010)). Conditional on entering politics, the evidence are mixed about the hurdles faced by women : while some studies suggest that parties might fail at promoting women to high positions and at fielding them in winnable races, thus undermining the quality of elected politicians (Baltrunaite et al (2014), Besley et al (2017b), Sanbonmatsu (2010), Thomas and Bodet (2013), Esteve-Volart and Bagues 2012, Casas-Arce and Saiz (2015)), other studies mitigate these findings (Campa et al (2017), Bagues and Campa (2017), Lippmann (2018)). Similarly, evidence on the last hurdle potentially faced by women in politics (namely, discrimination from voters) are mixed : they appear to depend on the features of the electoral system (Gonzalez-Eiras and Sanz (2018), Baltrunaite et al (2017)) and on the prevalence of discrimination in other social and economic settings (such as the labor market Le Barbanchon and Sauvagnat (2018)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Biases: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in French Local Elections

Eyméoud

Vertier²

2017

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Women are under-represented in politics. In this paper, we test one of the potential explanations for this situation: gender-bias from voters. We use a natural experiment during French local elections in 2015: for the first time in this country, candidates had to run by pairs, which had to be gender-balanced. We argue that this reform confused some voters, who might have assumed that the first name on the ballot represented the "main" candidate. Since the order of the candidates on the ballot was determined by alphabetical order, the order of appearance of male and female candidates is as-good-as-random, and this setting allows us to isolate gender biases from selection effects. Our main result is that there exists a negative gender bias affecting right-wing candidates, who receive about 1.5 points lower shares of vote when the female candidate appears first on the ballot. The missing votes prevented some pairs of candidates from being elected. Using the fact that the candidates can (but do not have to) report additional information about themselves on the ballot, we show that this discrimination is likely to be statistical, since the most affected women are those running in pairs which do not report any information.

show abstract

Sacrificial lambs, women candidates, and district competitiveness in Canada

Cited by 84 publications

References 37 publications

Does Female Incumbency Reduce Gender Bias in Elections? Evidence from Chile

Does Female Incumbency Reduce Gender Bias in Elections? Evidence from Chile

Extreme non-viable candidates and quota maneuvering in Brazilian legislative elections

Gender Biases: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in French Local Elections

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About