Are public attitudes congruent with parties’ nominations of female candidates? An assessment for party-voter dyads in the 2019 European Parliament elections

Recent decades have witnessed a steady increase in women’s political representation across most advanced democracies, partly due to the introduction of legislative gender quotas. There are different normative perspectives on this development. From one angle, these improvements of the descriptive representation of women are valuable per se. From a different angle, the quality of representation should primarily be assessed based on citizens’ preferences with regard to how they want to be represented. As the title of an article by Philip Cowley (2013) elegantly put it: "Why not ask the audience?". This question, which aligns with the "constructivist turn" in political theory on representation, has received only little empirical attention (Wolkenstein and Wratil 2020). In this paper, we therefore examine to which degree the attitudes towards women in politics that are held by a party’s voters correspond with said party’s candidate nomination decisions. At the level of party-voter dyads, we compare attitudinal measures from population surveys with the gender composition of candidate slates and, finally, with the party’s elected parliamentary delegation. We focus on the elections to the European Parliament (of 2019), which allows for a comparison based on a simultaneous European-wide electoral contest. Arguably, the second-order nature of these elections can facilitate the parties’ responsiveness towards their voters’ preferences regarding women representation. Original data on the outcomes of candidate selection is combined with survey data from the European/World Values Study round of 2017-2021. This enables us to map where party voters’ attitudes align or diverge from the nomination practices of party selectors and assess differences between different party families. The results inform important debates on the role of descriptive representation and legislative gender quotas.