Gendered candidate selection in sectarian countries: the Case of Lebanon

The inclusion of women and women's political issues has been one of the largest adjustments that political parties in democracies have had to make over the past decades. In an attempt to understand these dynamics, this paper focuses on the micro-foundations of a sectarian-based democratic system as a gendered political institution to identify mechanisms at work within parties. Following Ostrom’s (2011) definition of political institutions as the formal and informal rules of the game, this paper investigates how gendered (formal and informal) rules of candidate selection at the party level interact with the formal and informal rules of sectarian-based systems. The aim is, thus, to refine the ways in which party politics accounts for the institutional complexities and realities of gender by contributing to existing and emerging concepts in the literature on party politics. It seeks to provide new insights into the gendered dynamics of inclusion and exclusion underpinning sectarian polities, which requires putting the post-conflict and power-sharing, candidate selection, and feminist institutionalism literature into dialogue. By taking intersectional dynamics into consideration, it also strives to establish a thorough understanding of the interaction between formal and informal rules of both gender and political parties that influence the dynamics of stability and change in fragmented contexts. The empirical analysis draws on an original dataset on the characteristics of the 597 candidates who competed in the general elections in Lebanon in 2018 to examine the determinant factors that influence the probabilities of being nominated by a party and whether those variables differ by gender and sect. Lebanon serves as a crucial test case for gendering the theoretical and empirical findings on power-sharing arrangements, candidate choice, and political representation. A new electoral law passed in 2017 established preferential voting and proportional representation for 15 multi-member seats. The number of female candidates has increased dramatically across the country in 2018, but fewer female parliament members have been elected.