Posted on: 22 February 2011
An award for the best article published in 2010 in one of the top ranking US-political science journals, Political Research Quarterly (PRQ)*, has gone to Trinity political science lecturer Dr Gail McElroy and Professor of Comparative Political Behaviour and Pro Vice-Provost/ Chief Academic Officer Michael Marsh, for their article ‘Candidate gender and voter choice: analysis from a multimember preferential voting system’. Available at www.tcd.ie/ines.
Commenting on the significance of the research the judging committee said: “We were struck by the importance of the questions addressed and the quality of the data gathered to answer them. This is a great model for how to do high-quality social science. ” A prize of $1,000 was awarded.
It is a general phenomenon in liberal democracies that women are underrepresented in elected office at all levels. In the case of the Republic of Ireland, a mere 13% of the outgoing Dáil’s TDs are women. Such underrepresentation of women has been attributed to a multitude of factors: voter prejudice, biases in recruitment practices, campaign effects and shortfalls in the supply of women willing to run. Despite decades of research, basic questions such as whether or not the electorate discriminates against women in general, whether women vote disproportionately for women, and whether voters perceive female and male candidates differently remain unresolved.
In their article, Dr Gail McElroy and Professor Michael Marsh, examine the issue in the context of the Republic of Ireland where the electoral environment offers significant choice to the electorate in terms of both opportunities to vote for women and the party affiliations of female candidates. The multi-member nature of the constituencies should provide electorates with considerable flexibility in electing women. In particular, the single transferable vote (STV) in multi-member constituencies, gives an unusual degree of freedom to the voter to choose between candidates, both within and across political parties. Despite this flexibility, Ireland still has a very poor record of women’s representation in the Dáil by international standards.
In their analysis, the authors examined the opportunities for a gender based vote in the 2002 general election. They examined the aggregate evidence using original detailed variables about the background characteristics and election expenditure of all the candidates running in districts (incumbency, prior office holding, ministerial experience etc). This allowed them to examine whether certain candidates were disadvantaged by their gender, in general, in Ireland. Secondly, they examined patterns of voting behaviour from one of three districts (Dublin West) that used electronic voting from 2002. The data was used to examine the apparent importance of candidate gender as a voting cue. Thirdly, they examined survey data from the first ever Irish National Election Study to see if there was any evidence to suggest women tended to prefer female candidates and, if so, what sort of women and what sort of candidates.
On the basis of this extensive analysis the authors found that gender did not play a important role in candidate success or voter decision making in Ireland. Women candidates didn’t do significantly worse than male candidates in the aggregate. Nor did women seem to be discriminated against in terms of ballot order and rank in the analysis of the electronic data. The analysis of the individual-level data demonstrated that women didn’t seem to get votes disproportionately from female voters.
Commenting on the significance of the findings, authors, Dr McElroy and Professor Marsh said: “While none of the tests can be said to prove conclusively that gender is completely irrelevant in Irish elections, the article does test a rich variety of ways in which one could assent to female candidacy and we remain confident that if we have to look this hard to find any evidence of gender bias or effect in the Irish case, it cannot play a very significant role in voting behaviour.”
“In terms of an insight into the reasons for the continued underrepresentation of women in the Dáil, these figures do hint at supply side issues. It may be the case that increasing women’s political representation will depend on whether political parties have a strategic incentive to promote women.”
