Becoming Prime Minister in Europe: Gendered Paths to Political Power?
Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Ina Kubbe, Michelangelo Vercesi
Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany
Studies about the recruitment patterns and the duration of ministers and prime ministers in Europe have long been a domain of comparative politics. Yet, until today, comparative research has not examined the routes to prime minister’s office under the gender perspective. Do we find different pathways to power between male and female prime ministers in Europe? If yes, which factors describe the differences between male and female recruitment to executive power? Can we systematically identify a gender dimension in the career patterns of European prime ministers?
Focusing on those ten European countries in which female prime ministers served in office from 1945 to 2012, we argue that women follow different career paths in becoming prime minister than their masculine colleagues. The first part of the paper reviews the existing literature and develops our major hypothesis about the different “gender paths”.
In the second part of the paper, we test our assumptions by systematically describing the political careers and the “political capital” (i.e. political experiences) of all female prime ministers (N=11) who have served in 10 European countries between 1945 and 2012. The qualitative findings of these single case studies will be quantified in a cross-national data set.
In a third step, we compare these empirical results with an original data set on the political careers and the “political capital” of all masculine prime ministers (N=106) in the same ten countries under investigation (Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, United Kingdom). We conclude that the “routes” to becoming prime minister are similar in many ways, but also different regarding political experiences and educational background between man and women.
