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The Electoral Consequences of Gender in Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Jonathan Kelley  and
Ian McAllister
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Extract

The increasing importance of women in politics is a common feature of almost all advanced industrial societies. Women have become increasingly active in most aspects of political life during the 1970s: as voters, as lobbyists and, perhaps most significantly of all, as candidates for election to public office. The traditional prejudice against women in public life, which assumes women to be less suited to politics by temperament and training, suggests that they could be expected to receive fewer votes than men in an election. But it is unclear to what extent this prejudice has been mitigated by the broad changes which have taken place in women's roles in recent years. Can we still expect women candidates to fare less well than their male counterparts?

Such eviddce as there is in Australia suggests that the parties are less likely to nominate women but that, once nominated, women candidates fare neither better nor worse than men. Sawer concludes that ‘the differential electoral fortunes of male and female candidates has always reflected the failure to pre-select women for safe and winnable seats, not any failure to win votes.’ In a similar vein Mackerras argues that ‘the average performance of women is neither better nor worse than that of men. Women will be elected when parties select them for winnable seats.’ Research in the United States and Britain also suggests that a candidate's sex does not matter: Darcy and Schramm found that sex did not matter in the United States, controlling for incumbency and party, and in an analysis of three British general elections, Hills concluded that ‘the gender of a candidate makes only a very small difference to the voters.’

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , July 1983 , pp. 365 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 See, for example, Erskine, H., ‘The Polls: Women's Role’, Public Opinion Quarterly, xxxv (1971), 275–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ferrell, M., ‘A Woman for President: Changing Responses, 1958–72’, Public Opinion Quarterly, XXXVIII (1974), 390–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, the contrary argument has also been made that women candidates should receive more votes because they receive more public attention. See Stokes, Donald and Miller, Warren, ‘Party Government and the Saliency of Congress’, Public Opinion Quarterly, XXXVI (1962), 431–6Google Scholar and Tolchin, S. and Tolchin, M., Clout: Womanpower and Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973).Google Scholar

2 Sawer, Marian, ‘Women and Women's Issues in the 1980 Federal Elections’, Politics, XVI (1981), 243–9, p. 245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Mackerras, Malcolm, ‘Do Women Candidates Lose Votes? Further Evidence’, Australian Quarterly, LII (1980), 450–5, p. 454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Darcy, R. and Schramm, Sarah Slavin, ‘When Women Run Against Men’, Public Opinion Quarterly, XLI (1977), 1–12, p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hills, Jill, ‘Candidates: The Impact of Gender’, Parliamentary Affairs, XXXIV (1981), 221–8, p. 227.Google Scholar

5 For an examination of this thesis, see Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

6 Sawer, , ‘Women and Women's Issues’, p. 243.Google Scholar See also McAllister, Ian, ‘The Australian Democrats: Protest Vote or Portent of Realignment?’ Politics, XVII (1982), 68–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the recent history of the parties, see Jupp, James, Party Politics: Australia, 1966–81 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1982)Google Scholar and White, Kate, ‘Women and Party Politics in Australia’, Australian Quarterly LIII (1981), 20–39.Google Scholar

7 The source for 1974 was Mackerras, Malcolm, Elections 1975 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1975)Google Scholar; for 1977, Mackerras, Malcolm, Elections 1980 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980)Google Scholar; and for 1980, Australian Electoral Office, Analysis of the Final Count (Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1981).Google Scholar

8 The Australian electoral system is based on the alternative vote method in single-member constituencies. Electors express a preference for the candidates, and if no candidate receives an absolute majority of the votes on the first count (i.e., the first preference votes), then the candidate with the smallest number of votes is eliminated and his second preferences are distributed among the remaining candidates. This procedure continues until one candidate reaches a majority. The ‘two-party preferred vote’ refers to the preferences cast solely for the two main parties. Liberal-Country and Labor, after the preferences of all minor candidates have been distributed. Where only two candidates from the two major parties are left in the final count, the exact two-party preferred vote is known; when any candidates from other parties are included in the final count, then the two-party preferred vote can only be estimated. See Rydon, Joan, ‘The Electoral System’ in Mayer, Henry and Nelson, Helen, eds, Australian Politics: A Third Reader (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1973).Google Scholar

9 These variables are defined as follows: Name reflects the ordinal position of the first two letters of the candidate's last name, scored so that the candidates in the first third of the alphabet get a score of approximately 1 and those in the last third get a score of approximately 0; position on the ballot paper (first, middle or last hence called FirstML) reflects the position of candidate's name on the actual ballot paper. Number of candidates on the ballot (LnNCands) is the natural logarithm of the number of candidates; it is included because the vote a candidate gets will depend on, inter alia, the number of candidates in the race. For a detailed analysis see Kelley, Jonathan and McAllister, Ian, ‘Ballot Paper Cues and the Vote in Australia and Great Britain: Alphabetic Voting, Sex, and Title’, Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming.Google Scholar We show there that the effect of name is entirely indirect through position on the ballot paper.

10 See, for example, Mackerras, , ‘Do Women Candidates Lose Votes?’Google Scholar

11 Sawer, , ‘Women and Women's Issues’.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Mackerras, Malcolm, Sharman, Campbell and Austen, Brian, ‘Discussion: Two-Party Preferred Vote, Pendulums, Swing, Uniformity and Patterns of Electoral Behaviour’, Politics, XIII (1978), 334–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Snider, G. A., ‘An Evaluation of Various Measures of Swing Voting in Australia, 1967–1975’, Politics, XI (1976), 185–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 In addition to this, we would argue that Sawer's results are biased for two reasons. Firstly, only one election is analysed, thereby causing problems with sample size because of the very small number of women candidates. In addition she examines only Labor candidates, ignoring both Liberal-Country party and minor party candidates. Secondly, the analysis does not control for the characteristics of the electorates for which women gain nomination, in spite of the fact (which she herself concedes) that women generally tend to be nominated for less winnable seats than men.

14 Each measure was operationalized by creating a composite variable from the individual variables using factor score coefficents from the factor analysis, and then scaled on a metric running from 0 to 100. See McAllister, Ian and Kelley, Jonathan, ‘Contextual Characteristics of Australian Federal Electorates’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology (forthcoming), Table 3.Google Scholar

15 This will hold, of course, only so long as the model is specified correctly and the indicators used are perfect measures. While it is unlikely that an empirical analysis will completely fulfil these two conditions, we believe that inaccuracies caused by variables omitted from the analysis or by measurement error will be small, and will not affect the interpretation of our findings.

16 The figures of Table 2 permit straightforward decomposition of the total disadvantage faced by women candidates. The total electoral disadvantage for woman candidates is 11 per cent (row 1). Of this 1 per cent is due to name, number of candidates, and position on the ballot (11 in row 1 minus to in row 2), 6 per cent to the fact that women tended not to receive a major-party nomination in that election (10 in row 2 minus 4 in row 3), and 1 per cent to characteristics of the seat (4 in row 3 minus 3 in row 4). For technical details, see Alwin, Duane F. and Hauser, Robert M., ‘The Decomposition of Effects in Path Analysis’, American Sociological Review, XL (1975), 37–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 For example, women who secure Labor party nomination get, on the average, electorates with a socio-economic status 9 points higher (on a scale of 0 to 100) than male candidates; that is of course a disadvantage since high status electorates are harder for Labor candidates to win. Conversely, women who get Liberal or Country party nominations get electorates which average 3 points lower in socio-economic status than male candidates; that is of course a disadvantage for them.

18 For example, if local party organizations generally offer less wholehearted support for women candidates than for male candidates, and if that has a substantial effect on the vote, then our estimates would overstate the disadvantage women candidates face from the electorate (since the organizational disadvantage would mistakenly be attributed to gender). But on the other hand, if for example, women candidates are generally better qualified than male candidates, and if the quality of the candidate has a substantial effect on the vote, then our estimates understate the disadvantages faced by women candidates (since the advantage due to quality would mistakenly be deducted from the disadvantage due to gender). We doubt that biases due to such factors – which might well cancel each other out – would be large enough to affect our conclusions.

19 See, for example, Hanushek, E. A. and Jackson, J. E., Statistical Methods for Social Scientists (New York: Academic Press, 1977).Google Scholar

20 The natural log of the number of candidates (LnNCands) is used instead of the number itself, since each additional candidate can be expected to split the vote proportionately rather than subtract a constant percentage from it, which implies a log model. The choice makes no practical difference for the issues at hand.