The Making and Breaking of Senior Women MPs: Exploring the Role of Political Parties

While women in recent decades have entered parliaments in greater numbers, male MPs still have longer careers, hold more prominent positions and thus yield more power. As representatives, women MPs may thus be less effective, threatening the legitimacy of contemporary parliaments. This paper therefore zooms in on one of the crucial gatekeepers to the electoral ballot: The political parties. Theoretically, I argue that ideological leaning, gender quotas, and organizational set-up in parties shape their propensity to renominate women incumbents, with left-of-center parties, party quotas and centralized organisations being conducive for securing that women not just enter, but also make it to the senior ranks of parliamentarians. To explore these prepositions, I make use of a novel dataset of 15 countries with individual level data on parliamentarians from the 1990s until today. Empirically, the paper makes two important contributions to the current state of the art: It shows descriptively which party families have the most experienced male and female politicians and analytically shed light on the intra-organisational characteristics of parties that drive these patterns. As such, the paper takes us one step closer to understanding the enduring under-representation of women, both in descriptive and substantive ways, in contemporary democracies.