UC Berkeley

My dissertation and book project, Gendered Gatekeepers: Barriers to Women in Party-Controlled Candidate Selection, examines how the gatekeepers within political parties evaluate women and men during candidate selection processes. The existing literature largely focuses on the experiences of women who compete for office in countries with formal and transparent candidate selection processes, whether voter-based primaries in the United States or party-based mechanisms in most of Western Europe. However, the majority of women who seek elected office in democratizing countries around the world are primarily evaluated through party-controlled candidate selection processes that are often opaque and informal. Focusing on the intra-party dynamics of candidate selection, I investigate the conditions in which party gatekeepers are more likely to choose women to stand for election.

I argue that current models of candidate selection, particularly in new democracies, are misspecified because they overlook two key actors who are central to the evaluation of women candidates: the gatekeepers and the family. Party gatekeepers are the party leaders and members who choose which individuals will stand as candidates for the party in an election. In studying the candidate preferences of gatekeepers, I demonstrate that their personal experiences and characteristics affect which candidates they ultimately support during the selection process. In addition, I show that the candidate attributes gatekeepers prefer are not merely individual; they are familial. Despite the transition to multiparty elections in many countries, the personal status of individuals in many societies remains tied to the political and social influence of their families. In this context, I find that the family attributes preferred by party gatekeepers are conditioned by the gender of candidates. I demonstrate that gatekeepers evaluate men more highly for having a traditional family dynamic, thus simultaneously rewarding men who are heads of households while penalizing women who deviate from traditional expectations. I find that women are elevated in candidate selection only when their families have demonstrated partisan loyalty over the long term.

In this dissertation, I explain the origins and mechanisms for this gender-based difference in the evaluation of family attributes, offering a corrective to existing work which has largely ignored how families (beyond childrearing and marital status) can affect a woman’s political prospects. Many scholars have suggested that the key to decreasing bias against women during the candidate selection process is to include women in party positions of power. But when examining women gatekeepers, I show that they are not immune from gendered biases. Rather, I show that an individual’s level of internalized sexist beliefs, measured through ambivalent sexism, determines how gatekeepers evaluate gendered attributes.

I further argue that women are disadvantaged during candidate selection because gatekeepers evaluate the qualifications of candidates in line with their gender scheme (the expected behavior and roles of their gender identity). Due to the association of leadership and financial attributes with masculinity, women are not rewarded for masculine qualifications but rather for the few feminine qualifications that gatekeepers perceive as valuable. Lastly, I show that despite gatekeepers believing that the `ideal' candidate for both men and women is the same, meeting those qualifications, in reality, is much more difficult for women.

My research presents a valuable contribution to the study of women in politics in democratizing countries. Building on over 90 in-depth interviews with candidates, party members, parliamentarians, and activists in Zambia, I have developed two original sources of data that provide unique insights into the composition and preferences of party gatekeepers. First, I compiled the actual candidate recommendation reports produced by gatekeepers during candidate selection within Zambia’s two main national parties in 2016. I analyze these reports to assess how candidate gender and attributes influence a gatekeeper’s ultimate recommendation. Additionally, I conducted survey experiments among over 1,300 party members to assess how their individual characteristics and preferences affect candidate selection. I also measured gendered beliefs through an ambivalent sexism index to show that beliefs, not identity, motivate an individual’s gendered perception of candidates.