Next events:

Thursday 29th June (14:00-15:30 hrs UK Time): Research Seminar

Glass Ceilings & Cliffs: Gendered Party Leadership in Parliamentary Systems

Speaker: Andrea Aldrich (Yale University)

Convenor: William Daniel (University of Nottingham)

The Research Centre for the Study of Parties and Democracy are delighted to be welcoming Andrea Aldrich (Yale University) to present ‘Glass Ceilings & Cliffs: Gendered Party Leadership in Parliamentary Systems’.

While the number of women in office around the world is on the rise, men continue to outnumber women at high rates in top leadership positions. There are many reasons why it remains difficult for women to reach powerful positions within politics that cover myriad electoral, institutional, and individual conditions. In this monograph, we examine women’s careers as political party leaders. We seek to understand what conditions make it more likely that women are selected as party leaders, run as candidates for party leadership, and how gender impacts leadership tenures. Tracking the careers of 269 political party leaders in eleven advanced parliamentary democracies between 1980 and 2020, we provide rich, descriptive data on all stages of the leadership selection and removal process and test the relationship between gender and leadership selection, challenges to party leadership, and removal of leaders. Our analyses focus on performance indicators, selection procedures, gender equality in politics, and their interactions as factors affecting the selection and survival of women party leaders.

Andrea Aldrich is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Her research examines the representation of women, exploring the conditions that encourage women’s political leadership and the consequences of women in power within political parties and legislative institutions. The cornerstone of her research is the multifaceted role political party institutions play in shaping representation focusing on how the internal organization of parties promote women to positions of political power and how party structures interact with system-level political institutions. She is an expert on party politics in both Western and Eastern Europe and the European Union. Her research has been published in Party Politics and Politics & Gender, among others. Before arriving at Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Houston with the Political Parties Database, a visiting scholar at Texas A&M University, a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, and a former co-chair of the Parties Research Network for the Council for European Studies.

All welcome. This seminar will be held as a hybrid event. Please indicate in your registration whether you wish to take part via our online platform or in person. The in-person event will take place in Monica Partridge D13 on the University Park Campus at the University of Nottingham.

Please register here: Registration link

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To Be Confirmed (Spring 2023): Big Ideas Workshop
Grant capture sandpit and luncheon

Convenor: William Daniel (University of Nottingham)

Place:

To be confirmed.

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To Be Confirmed: Research Seminar
Local Candidates in Indian Elections

Speaker: Dishil Shrimankar (University of Manchester)

Discussant: Simon Toubeau (University of Nottingham)

Chair and Convenor: Fernando Casal Bértoa (University of Nottingham)

Synopsis of the paper:

Campaigns not only mobilize those they directly contact; they also benefit from “secondary mobilization”, when the voters they contact in turn mobilize members of their own social networks. In this article, we hypothesize that the existing social networks of local candidates form an important type of secondary mobilization. These mobilzation networks help to extend the range of people who are contacted by a campaign, boosting candidate support and in the process increasing turnout in the local area. We provide evidence for these hypotheses using geo-matched micro-level polling booth data to exploit within-electoral-district variation in candidate vote share and turnout in India (N=523,214).

Bio:

Dishil Shrimankar is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Manchester. Prior to joining the University, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. He completed a PhD in political science from the University of Nottingham. His research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, Indian politics and quantitative methods. He is currently conducting research on local candidates in Indian elections as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded early career research fellowship. His doctoral dissertation explained the puzzle of why regional parties succeed in some Indian regions, but not in others. He showed that when national parties are decentralized and the regional branch is granted more autonomy, regional parties find it hard to succeed. A second component of the dissertation investigates why some regional branches of national parties have more autonomy where others do not.

Place:

To be confirmed.