Women’s Political Parties in
Europe
Kimberly Cowell-Meyers
American University
In representative democracies, political parties organize the public will,
giving expression to political differences in society (see Katz and Mair
1995; Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge 1994; Sartori 1967). Parties
can also deepen democracy by broadening the connections between
representatives and constituents, helping to hold political institutions
accountable and increasing the participation of previously marginalized
groups (see Costain 2005; Kitschelt 1993; Shugart 1994; Kittilson and
Tate 2005; Young 2000).
A body of scholarship has emerged to address small parties, their
organizational development, and their electoral success (see Harmel and
Robertson 1985; Hug 2001; Ignazi 1992; Kitschelt 1988, 1989, 1990,
1993; Meguid 2005; Taagepera and Shugart 1989; Tavits 2008).
Virtually none exists on women’s parties, however. There are rich case
studies of women’s parties (Cowell-Meyers 2011; Dominelli and
Jonsdottir 1988; Krupavicius and Matonyte 2003; Levin 1999; Racioppi
and O’Sullivan See 1995; Slater 1995) but almost no consideration of
women’s parties as a comparative phenomenon.1 Even the extensive
literature on women’s social movements fails to explore the development
of women’s political parties and their subsequent representation. Instead,
I am enormously grateful to Dr. Assen Assenov, Dr. Jun Lu, and George Panterov for their astute and
patient support in the analysis of the data. Ben Mainwaring and Lisa Moscatiello provided invaluable
assistance in the collection and organization of this unique and challenging dataset. Many librarians,
archivists, members of electoral commissions, and gender and politics scholars supplied case-specific
information that could not have been obtained without their kind help. I am deeply indebted and
thankful to all of them.
Published by Cambridge University Press 1743-923X/16 $30.00 for The Women and Politics Research Section of the
American Political Science Association.
# The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association, 2016
doi:10.1017/S1743923X15000586
1. Ishiyama (2003) and Leyenaar (2012) are notable exceptions, but Ishiyama’s analysis is limited to
nine parties in postcommunist states in Eastern Europe, and Leyenaar’s covers material only until 1994.
1
Politics & Gender, 12 (2016), 1–27.
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it tends to confine its analysis to allies within parties or movement support
for political parties (Banaszak 2005; Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003;
Costain 1981) with occasional acknowledgment of the utility of women’s
electoral mobilization for their representation (see Lovenduski 2005;
Matland 2003). And, yet, women’s parties continue to contest elections;
in May 2014 three women’s parties stood for election to the European
Parliament, and the Swedish Feminist Initiative won the first MEP seat
for a women’s party.
This neglect of women’s parties is curious for two reasons: first,
momentum is building within the study of social movements to consider
the intersection of movements and other types of political organization
(see Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Clemens 1997; Goldstone 2003;
McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; McAdam and Tarrow 2010). Second,
feminist scholars increasingly acknowledge the relevance of the state to
advancing women’s interests (consider, for example, the Research
Network on Gender Politics and the State [RNGS] project headed by
Amy Mazur and Dorothy McBride Stetson). Feminist demands
ultimately require state action for resolution. As an organizational
innovation, women’s parties may allow for tactical engagement with the
formal institutions of the state in ways that expand the inclusion of
women and women’s interests in decision making. They may be a
critically important tool for feminist advancement.
This project considersthe emergence of women’s parties, their nature, and
development in a comparative framework. Using an original dataset derived
from European electoral commissions, statistical offices, national libraries,
media archives, party records, and interviews of experts from the respective
countries, I document and describe 30 such parties contesting elections at
the national level in Europe since 1987. I then conduct a series of tests on
this panel data to determine when and under what conditions women’s
parties are likely to emerge. I argue that women’s parties are indications of
failures of the established political parties to include and represent
women’s interests. Additionally, I demonstrate that women’s parties are
more likely to appear where women are empowered unevenly than where
they are already included or their marginalization is consistent.
THE WOMEN‘S PARTY
Women’s parties present a fascinating series of theoretical puzzles and pose
an equally compelling research agenda. First, the raison d’etre of women’s
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parties — to represent women’s interests in politics — would seemingly
have broad appeal in every society where women comprise
approximately half of the electorate but only a small fraction of the
legislature. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the average
percentage of women in parliaments the world over is only 21%, and in
only a handful of countries worldwide do women comprise more than
40% of the legislature, suggesting widespread occasion for campaigns to
increase women’s representation. In addition, as an emerging literature
calls for examining the relationship between movements and parties,
specifically with regards to women’s mobilization, there is a growing
sense that movements and parties are linked (see Armstrong and
Bernstein 2008, Clemens 1997; Goss and Heaney 2010); they are
“different but parallel approaches to influencing political outcomes”
(Goldstone 2003, 8). As Andrews argues, “formal organizations [such as
political parties] become a necessary vehicle for advancing a group’s
claims in the policy-making process” (2001, 76). As women’s social
movements were represented in more than 70 countries by 1995 (Htun
and Weldon 2010), women’s parties might be expected to be
commonplace and durable.
Yet, women’s parties are few, small in scale, and transitory. Of course,
mainstream democratic theory does not assume that substantive
representation requires descriptive representatives; women’s interests in
politics may suitably be served by male legislators so that demand for
such a party is not equally intense in all contexts.2 Furthermore, the
literature on social movements indicates that movements require
resources and opportunities to mobilize and take root (see Meyer and
Minkoff 2004; Tarrow 1994), which are supply-side forces that would not
be uniform across states either. Because the issue of women’s parties has
been neglected to date, however, we do not know what social and
political forces encourage a women’s movement to form a political party.
In other words, we do not yet know why gender is triggered as a
mobilizing strategy in some contexts or why some women’s movements
choose to adopt this tactic. This article presents the first theory of
women’s party emergence and offers a preliminary analysis of the
conditioning variables producing women’s parties in Europe.
A second puzzle regarding women’s parties reflects the fact that women’s
experiences are socially constructed, and the issues around which women
organize are historically and culturally specific. This does not, however,
2. For a discussion of the politics of presence, see Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995.
WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTIES IN EUROPE 3
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render them beyond our ability to find common patterns and generate
knowledge of use in social movement theory and feminist research (see
Beckwith 2000). Women’s parties may represent and mobilize women in
markedly disparate ways and place very different kinds of demands on
political systems, but they share a common agenda to advance the
interests of women in politics. In the absence of a systematic study, we
do not know which issues women’s parties represent, the frames they
employ to mobilize women, and the mechanisms they use to advance
their agendas. This project offers the first examination of these fertile
subjects for political research using comparative data.
Third, some women’s parties, such as those in Iceland, Israel, and
Northern Ireland, have had striking effects on women’s representation in
politics. Though small, short-lived, and marginal, these parties altered the
discourse, behavior, and policy in the other parties in their respective
systems (see Cowell-Meyers 2011; Dominelli and Jonsdottir 1988; Levin
1999). Their impact was not a consequence of their electoral success, but
their presence triggered a process that expanded women’s inclusion in the
other larger, more powerful parties. Though not all women’s parties can
be expected to spark a process of gendered contagion in other parties, that
some women’s parties can have such effects on women’s representation
across the political system merits their consideration and motivates this study.
CONCEPTUALIZING A WOMEN’S PARTY
Women’s parties are autonomous organizations of or for women that run
candidates for elected office. What makes them women’s parties is the
explicit agenda to advance the volume and range of women’s voices in
politics. In other words, a women’s party is an organ designed
specifically and primarily to increase women’s representation in politics.
Most typically, they are hybrids of social movements and political parties,
a movement qua party, intended as a mechanism through which women
may engage directly in the political process, achieving access and
inclusion (see Cowell-Meyers 2014). Their autonomy is important to
their definition: women’s parties are independent of other political
parties or structures — in Weldon’s (2002, 80) words — “that do not
make the condition of women their primary concern.” These are not
women’s wings or branches of established political parties, which allows
them to focus solely on addressing women’s issues rather than fitting
their concerns into those of a parent organization.
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Though all political parties by definition seek to elect their members to
political office, electoral success is not typically the main strategic goal of
small parties. Their goal instead is to draw attention to their cause (see
MacKenzie’s [2005] discussion of profamily parties in Canada).
Women’s parties succeed in increasing women’s representation by
embarrassing the other, more mainstream and more powerful parties for
not including women in party leadership, putting women forward as
candidates, giving enough attention to gender dynamics, or addressing
the movement’s concerns. For example, Monica McWilliams, one of the
founding members of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition,
described this logic explicitly in an interview with the author, asserting
that the NIWC intended to manipulate the political opportunism of the
other parties’ leaders, constituting a “sufficient threat to them [to get
them] to put more women forward and to take the issues seriously.”
Kazimiera Prunskiene, founder of the Lithuanian Women’s Party, also
describes the function of the party in terms of threatening the maledominated
parties with the intent of changing their policies on women
and women’s representation (see Krupavicius and Matonyte 2003, 91).
Thus, these parties can increase women’s representation overall by
improving women’s status in the other parties, rather than by winning
many votes/seats. Direct political engagement allows a women’s
movement to expand their opportunities to set the public agenda, draw
attention to their issues, and influence the behavior and rhetoric of the
conventional institutions of political power.
Some women’s parties tie the marginalization of women in politics to
overarching and oppressive systems of patriarchal dominance; these
feminist parties are a subset of women’s parties. Other women’s parties
may not embrace the feminist label, emphasizing “the primacy of
women’s gender experience, women’s issues, and women’s leadership and
decision-making” (Beckwith 2000, 437) but not connecting their agenda
to ending patriarchy. They are more about inclusion than transformation.
In short, it is not the particular issues they represent that define parties as
women’s parties. Instead, women’s parties are self-conscious and explicit
constructions around gender, drawing from some common experience of
women in a given society or sector of it and designating themselves as the
representatives of women through their party label. It is their selfidentification
as the voice of women, suggesting that that voice is not
being heard elsewhere through the other parties in the system, that makes
them meaningful and interesting. And, because women’s parties are rare,
the situations in which they do emerge deserve analysis.
WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTIES IN EUROPE 5
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THEORY/HYPOTHESES
We know from strong comparative scholarship on women’s movements
such as that by Lisa Baldez (2003) that gender is more likely to be a
successful appeal for collective action during processes of democratic
transition when women are excluded from decision making by male
opposition leaders. We also know that levels of women’s representation
in national legislatures can be explained by structural factors such as
proportional representation, measures of women’s socioeconomic
development or position within society, cultural factors such as hostility
towards the advancement of women, as well as the presence or absence
of gender quotas and (see Reynolds 1999; Rule and Zimmerman 1994;
Siaroff 2000; Tremblay 2008). My argument ties these strains of previous
scholarship together and constructs a theory of relative deprivation to
explain the emergence of women’s parties: women’s parties are responses
to low levels of opportunity for women to be represented through
traditional or established mechanisms. Their emergence is an act of
resistance to structures that exclude them and a measure of their
disappointment in and neglect by the established parties. (See Hug
[2001] and Tavits [2008], who theorize about the role of neglect and
disappointment in the formation of new political parties.) In other
words, I hypothesize that the likelihood of women’s parties may increase
where there is a disjuncture between these forces that both enable them
to advocate for themselves and prevent them from inclusion in
traditional forms. As Rosenbluth, Salmond and Thies (2006) attest,
increasing women’s professional opportunities should create the
conditions under which parties would seek to compete for women’s
votes by increasing women’s representation within the parties. However,
where women’s professional engagement occurs without opportunities
for representation in the established mainstream parties, women’s groups
become frustrated by this lack of opportunity and choose to form a
women’s party to pressure the established parties to address their issues.
H1: Women’s parties are more likely where women are empowered
economically (i.e., women’s participation in the labor force and education
levels are high).
H2: Women’s parties are more likely where women are disempowered or
underrepresented by mainstream political parties and processes (i.e., where
women’s representation is low, there are not gender quotas for candidates
or parliaments, and the dominant culture is biased against their inclusion).
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H3: Women’s parties are more likely where women experience high levels
of economic empowerment but low levels of political empowerment (i.e., the
interactions of H3 and H4).
Women’s parties can also be viewed through the lenses of both “new”
and “fringe” parties. As Duverger’s Law asserts, multiple, smaller parties
are more common where electoral structures do not penalize them;
district magnitude, electoral formula, and the size of legislature lower
the barriers to entry for small parties and are generally recognized as the
most significant factors determining the number of parties in a system
(see Harmel and Robertson 1985; Hug 2001; Lijphart 1994; Salmond
2006; Taagepera and Shugart 1989; Tavits 2008). Thus, I hypothesize
that women’s parties are more likely to emerge where these structural
features suggest greater opportunity for larger numbers of parties in general.
H4: Women’s parties are more likely where (a) district magnitude is
high, (b) the total number of seats is high, (c) systems use PR (as opposed
to SMPD) electoral rules for most of the seats, and (d) many parties are
present in the system.
These structural features of a political system are typically static, however,
and new features are not as common as the emergence of new parties.
Instead, some variable of dynamism must be taken into consideration.
Scholarship on the changing repertoires of social movements, including
the emergence of new parties out of social movements, such as the
evolution of Green parties, suggests that new political opportunities
present occasions for social movements to adopt new structures and
patterns of mobilization (Kitschelt 1988, 1989, 1990; Meyer and Minkoff
2004; Tarrow 1994). In addition, as Margit Tavits (2008) notes, new
parties are more common in newer democracies as parties struggle to
establish their reputations for electoral viability. Given the cases in the
study include those in transition from communism, the immediate
measure of new political opportunities can be reasonably conceptualized
as a change in electoral law or even measured as age of democratic
institutions. Thus,
H5: Women’s parties are more likely where political institutions and
electoral laws are new.
Table 1 explains the definitions of the variables used to test these
hypotheses and the sources of this data.
WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTIES IN EUROPE 7
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METHOD
This study uses an original dataset that was compiled by the author. The
first portion of the study documents and describes the women’s parties
that emerged in the 47 countries that are currently members of the
Council of Europe, in the period from 1987 to 2007.3 The second
portion uses pooled time series analysis and employs logistical regression
on a more limited dataset to test the ability of the hypotheses to predict
the likelihood of a women’s party emerging.4 Logistical regression is used
because the dependent variable of women’s parties is measured as a
nominal level variable (presence or absence), and much of the data for
the independent variables are interval. Although the panel data is crosssectional,
time-series data, the window does not provide enough electoral
cycles for each case to make effective use of a fixed effects model. A
random-effects model is used instead. The unit of analysis in these tests
is, thus, each election year in each of the countries included (n ¼ 161).
For the regression analysis, women’s parties are defined as those running
candidates for the national legislature; European-only and regional-only
women’s parties are excluded. Table 1 contains definitions and sources
of the data.
HOW MANY WOMEN’S PARTIES, WHERE, AND WHEN?
The data reveal the existence of 30 women’s parties registered at the
national level in 20 states in Europe from 1987 to 2007. One more
existed solely at the regional level (Greenland) and two at the European
level (Spain and Greece). In six countries, more than one women’s party
emerged in this period, with the largest numbers of parties in a single
country occurring in Poland (four) and in Russia (three) in the first few
years of competitive elections after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The majority of these parties were created in the 1990s. Of the 30 parties,
20 were created between 1990 and 2000. Six were created between 2001
3. All data is available upon request from the author.
4. The dataset for the regression analysis covers the years 199222007. The year 1992 was used, as data
are simply too difficult to obtain for the first few years of the post-communist regimes in Eastern Europe,
and in many cases, the noise-to-signal ratio meant that it did not make sense to include the first elections
after the collapse of the communism. This dataset also excludes states with less than 100,000 people,
those from the former Yugoslavia, which were engaged in civil war through much of this period
(Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro), and Azerbaijan and Armenia (which were not admitted
to the Council until the twenty-first century). It also excludes Turkey, as data are not consistently
available for this period.
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Table 1. Operationalization of variables
Variable Definition Source N Mean St. Dev. Min Max
Women’s party
Y/N
At least one party explicitly referring
to women, mothers, or feminists in
its title or deeming itself a party
dedicated to advancing the interests
of women in its mandate was on the
ballot for national election
Collected from numerous elections
databases, national statistical
offices, electoral commission
records, national libraries, media
archives, party records, and
interviews with experts from the 38
countries in the study
158 .25 .44 0 1
Independent Variables
Structural Variables
Effective threshold Base threshold is calculated using the
formula 75 / (DM + 1) for the tier
in parliament (including
compensatory tiers with fixed
numbers of seats) with the highest
district magnitude. If there are a
variable number of leftover seats
distributed at a national rather than
district level, and the base threshold
figure was lower than the legal
threshold for inclusion in the
distribution of leftover seats, it was
retained. However, if the legal
threshold for winning seats was
higher than this threshold, the legal
threshold was used.
Calculated from District Magnitude,
taken from Database of Political
Institutions (DPI), Keefer (2010),
and the European Elections
Database
160 7.02 7.52 .01 37.5
Continued
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Table 1. Continued
Variable Definition Source N Mean St. Dev. Min Max
Electoral structure Main mode of election to lower
house of Parliament (Proportional
Representation or other)
DPI, Keefer (2010) 161 .36 .48 0 1
Total number of
seats
Total number of seats in lower house DPI, Keefer (2010) 161 248.1 168.8 54 672
Party
fractionalization
Herfindahl Index of party
fractionalization of all legislative
parties in the lower house
DPI, Keefer (2010) 153 0.71 .11 .24 .93
Age of democracy Years democraticab
DPI, Keefer (2010) 155 31.90 27.5 0 77
Women’s Empowerment Variables
Women’s labor
force
participationc
Percent of female population 15 years
of age and older that is
economically active, modeled ILO
estimate
World Bank, World Development
Indicators
161 50.40 8.00 27.60 71.80
Women’s
representation
Percent women in the lower house
lagged by one election
IPU, plus consultation with
individual legislatures and electoral
commissions for historical data
156 15.20 10.30 1.5 42.7
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Major party quota
Y/N
Presence of a gender quota for
candidates for national office in a
major party, defined as those that
won more than 10% of the popular
vote in that electoral year
Some of this data came from the
Quota Project and Krook 2009. I
consulted directly with scholars or
the parties themselves to fill in
holes, resolve discrepancies, or to
recreate the historical record.
145 .56 .50 0 1
Notes: a
New Electoral Law and Age of Democracy are strongly related (t ¼ 8.724, df ¼ 99, p ¼ .00). Age of democracy was used in this model instead of the new
electoral law dummy due to its precision. b
Age of Democracy is also highly correlated with gender bias (R ¼ 2.872), which is measured by the percent of
respondents who agree with the statement, “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do,” in the World Values Survey (WVS), the Voice
of the People Millennium Survey (2000), and the Eurobarometer 63.1 (2005). The data are from Cleary (2010). Because age of democracy is related so strongly
to gender bias, it represents not just the age of the institutions, but also the political environment of public opinion in which women seek representation.
c
Women in the workforce was the only variable used to explain women’s economic empowerment. I attempted to use two other measures. The first was
women’s education completion rates, but the data from the World Bank and the United Nations on percent women completing their secondary level of
education and women’s total years of schooling proved incomplete, inconsistent, and unreliable. Both were also not associated with other variables in the
dataset in anticipated ways. For example, there is not a particularly close association between women’s education and their labor force participation (r ¼ .392),
gender bias (r ¼ .216), or women’s descriptive representation (r ¼ .222). Instead, though there is a large range in completion rates, women’s secondary
education is likely a reflection of education rates in general in society and not of gender-specific effects. In fact, women’s secondary completion rate and the
overall completion rate in these countries correlates at r ¼ .935. The second discarded variable on women’s economic empowerment was women’s percent of
total income. It was collected from the same sources and had the same effects. In none of the regression models did either prove significant, but the data’s
quality undermines confidence in these results.
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Table 2. Explaining the emergence of a women’s party (panel random effects logit estimates)
Model 1 (Structural
Factors)
2 (+Women’s
Empowerment Variables)
3 (+Interaction
Effects)
4 (+Interaction Effects
plus E/W)
Effective threshold 0.9** (21.81) 0.86** (22.16) 0.85** (22.29) .87** (22.21)
Electoral structure 6.69** (1.95) 10.91** (2.21) 9.78** (2.04) 7.24** (2.01)
Total seats 1.00 (1.56) 1.01* (2.06) 1.01** (2.09) 1.01** (2.25)
Party fractionalization 22026.47** (2.50) 30031.33** (2.28) 15521.79** (2.09) 20952.22** (2.26)
Age of democracy 1 (2.32) 1 (.011) 1.02 (.66) _____
Women’s labor force part. 1.18** (2.23) 1.38** (2.21) 1.36** (2.35)
Women’s representation in lower
house (lagged by one election)
.95 (2.88) 2.34* (1.94) 2.25* (1.92)
Major party quota Y/N .048 (2.90) 0.00* (21.75) 0.00 (21.59)
Lab force part.* (1-women’s rep) 1.02** (2.07) 1.02**(2.02)
Lab force part* Absence of party
quota
1.25* (1.69) 1.22 (1.55)
Postcommunist ______ ______ ______ 1.22(0.18)
Constant 29.85 218.13 226.68 226.75
Sigma 1.69 1.62 1.58 1.48
Rho .46 .44 .43 .40
N 138 132 132 137
Nagelkerke R^2 .16 .24 .30 .32
Note: Only election years are used. Odds ratios reported (Z-scores in parentheses). *significant at 0.1; ** significant at 0.05.
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and 2007, and four existed before 1990. Though not all of the parties
created in the 1990s were in newer democracies, the five oldest parties
existed in the more established democracies.
Almost all of these parties were tiny, receiving less than 3% of the vote
(though parties in Armenia, Iceland, and Russia earned much higher).
Approximately 60% of the parties had some durability over the course of
the years in the study, existing for more than one electoral cycle. In fact,
the norm was for parties to exist for two to three electoral cycles, or 8 to
12 years. The longest standing parties were from established democracies
in Western Europe, such as in Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland.
The experience of these parties is hard to describe with a common
narrative. The parties in Western Europe enjoyed stability in stark
contrast to the parties in Eastern Europe. In the post-communist states
where political systems, in particular party systems, were in flux for much
of the period of the study, women’s parties enjoyed some wild successes
and dramatic collapses. For example, Armenia’s Shamiram Women’s
Party won more than 130,000 votes in 1995, more than 17% of the vote.
Though they won eight seats in a legislature of 189 that electoral cycle,
the party won no seats in the next elections in 1999. Similarly, Women
of Russia won more than four million votes in 1993, which is
approximately 8% of the vote in the proportional segment of the ballot,
and earned 24 seats in the Duma out of 304, but in 1995, they earned
only three. In contrast, the German Feminist Party, in existence since at
least 1990, has been able to churn out more than 100,000 votes in the
last three EU elections though they have never won a seat at the national
or European levels.
Another interesting pattern involves the independence versus
cooperativeness of the parties. In some cases, such as the Women of
Russia (see Ishiyama 2003), the parties were fiercely independent,
concerned about sacrificing their integrity, or being coopted into the
mainstream parties. In other instances, such as in Bulgaria, Georgia,
Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and the United
Kingdom, women’s parties joined electoral coalitions with other parties,
with the Feminist-Green Alternative in Switzerland contesting elections
in coalition from 1979 to 2003. In Bulgaria, the coalition behavior of the
women’s party seemed designed to save the political system from collapse
more than to deliver tangible electoral benefits for the party itself; in
2001 the Party of Bulgarian Women served as an electoral partner to the
National Movement of Simeon II, the returned king who ran for
president but whose own party was prevented from running on a
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technicality. The coalition won 42.73%, though the women’s party took no
seats. This dilemma over whether to pool resources with other parties at the
cost of compromising some portion of the mission or appeal of the party
versus remaining pure but isolated is a key strategic challenge for new
parties.
Reflecting the spectrum of women’s organizing, the parties cover a range
of agendas and perspectives on the degree to which they seek to challenge
established patterns in society. As Goss and Heaney (2010) explain,
women’s movements typically appeal to maternal (essentialisttraditionalist),
equality (feminist), or feminine/expressive frames
(recasting gender stereotypes), or they may combine these frames into
hybrid messages that, in theory, broaden the movement’s appeal. In
these cases, a clear pattern of different frames emerged across the two
parts of Europe. In the West, almost every party, such as the Feminist
Initiative of Sweden, or the Frauen Macht Politics! of Switzerland, are or
were explicitly feminist in their titles or manifestoes, seeking to overturn
patriarchy throughout society. For example, the manifesto of the Dutch
Vrouwenpartij, founded in 1985, called for “structural change of our
society . . . The present norms and values must be adjusted according to
those of women” (quoted in Leyenaar 2012). These feminist women’s
parties argued that the established left-wing parties within their systems
either did not set high enough standards in terms of challenging
patriarchy or did not go far enough to achieve or enforce them, for
example, by giving lip service to the concepts in party platforms but not
directing resources or attention to the problem.
However, most of the parties from Eastern Europe were oriented toward
traditional or essentialist women’s issues, reflecting women in reproductive
or caring roles. Parties such as the National Party for Hungarian Mothers,
or Women & Family in Slovakia were more explicit about this identity, but
many others such as the Shamiram Women’s Party in Armenia, the
Women of Russia Party, and the Lithuanian Women’s Party, which do
not bear the reference to family or motherhood in their title, were
careful to focus party activities on such issues (see Ishiyama 2003;
Matland and Montgomery 2003). For example, the Moldovan Women’s
Party platform from 1994 called for equal rights for men and women
and programs to protect the labor market interests of women but also
prioritized education reform, a national system of preschools, protection
for pregnant women, children in poor families, the elderly, harmony
among social classes and groups, fair ethnic relations, etc. The platform
of the Georgia Women’s Party for Justice and Equality in 2008 sought
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benefits for pregnant women and large families to encourage a growth in
the birthrate (see Schofield et al. 2010). Some of these essentialist parties
were explicitly antifeminist, though this was rare. More typically, the
parties represented appeals for equal rights, though not necessarily social
reorganization.
This pattern of feminism in the West and essentialism in the East likely
had three causes. As Baldez (2003) explains, in East Europe, feminism was
tainted by its associations with the previous regimes. Communism’s goals of
integrating women into the workforce and into the institutions used to
channel political participation seemed to overlap with international
feminist agendas. In fact, Baldez (2003) notes that under communism,
feminist slogans were used to encourage women to participate in official
party organs in places such as Poland and East Germany. Marsh (1996, 6)
also notes the distance between Eastern women’s activism and Western
feminism, observing that Western “femininski” are derided in Russia for
being out of touch with the real concerns of Russian women. This
skepticism of feminism meant that women in the East would not typically
mobilize around feminist frames either in opposition to the regime or in
the aftermath of the fall of communism.
Secondly, feminism in the East by many accounts also fell victim to the
rise or resurgence of national conservativism that followed the collapse of
communism (see Mostov 1999; Sauer, Lanzinger, and Frysak 2006).
There is a strong and well-documented tie between nationalist/nativist
projects and essentialist gender ideology: Molyneux, for example, notes
of the postcommunist East, “The new conservative nationalisms with
their distinctive re-invocation of religious morality have provided
arguments for the patriarchal reordering of gender relations. . .” (1994,
309). These gendered roles, in the words of Mostov, “delimit the
possibilities of equal citizenship” (1999, 58) and pit the nationalist cause
against the feminist one. The political context of nationalist recovery in
the East would have left little room for feminist mobilizations or may
have left movements wary of connecting themselves to international or
Western movements. And, the popular bias against women in political
office in Eastern Europe would likely curb the appeal of an explicitly
feminist party.5
5. One measure of this dynamic derives from a variable developed by Cleary (2010), in which he
combines answers to a similar prompt in the World Values Survey (WVS), the Voice of the People
Millennium Survey (2000), and the Eurobarometer 63.1 (2005). The value is a percent of
respondents who agree with the statement “On the whole, men make better political leaders than
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Finally, the pattern of feminism in the West and essentialism in the East
may also stem from the age of democratic institutions and the levels of
economic development in the two regions. Feminism could be viewed
as one element in a shift towards postmaterialist values within mass
belief systems in the advanced industrialized democracies of Western
Europe (see Dalton 2002; Inglehart 1997). In the East, however, in at
least the first half of the period under study, economic and political
turmoil from the collapse of communism would have contributed to a
different pattern in public opinion, emphasizing material concerns and
more traditional values. The essentialist frames of women’s parties in the
East reflected preoccupation with the need to rebuild social welfare
systems destroyed with the collapse of communism.
A common claim that the other parties do not represent women’s
interests connects these parties, however. For example, the Lithuanian
Women’s Party, solidly anticommunist and Eastern, was founded to
“decrease political dominance by one gender . . . we wanted to balance
out the many male-dominated parties that did not recognize they were
male parties . . . a female-dominated party permitted us to develop a
party program that reflected women’s political priorities” (Prunskiene, as
quoted in Krupavicius and Matonyte 2003, 90). Alevtina Fedulova, a
founding member and leader of the Women of Russia, explained the
formation of her party using similar principles: “All other parties
registering are, in fact, unisexual” (quoted in Weir 1993). “We realized
these [other] parties do not understand women’s problems. They don’t
even see women’s problems” (quoted in Kunstel 1993). And, in the
West, Monica McWilliams, founding member of the Northern Ireland
Women’s Coalition, in familiar terms, described the decision to form a
women’s party as “the only opportunity to have our voices heard in
Northern Ireland” (quoted in Sharrock 1996). This common agenda
reflects a perception of exclusion from mainstream political processes,
despite different conceptions of what women’s issues are. It remains to
be seen whether objective measures of exclusion can explain the
emergence of these parties.
The extent of the parties’ connections to women’s organizations is
difficult to ascertain. Some of these women’s parties emerged from local
bodies, campaigning in a few districts (and winning successes at the
local level) before expanding to contend for national offices. In
women do” (min ¼ 12, max ¼ 80, mean ¼ 39.40). In the dataset described below, this value is
correlated with postcommunism at 0.92.
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Switzerland, Moldova, Slovenia, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and
Bulgaria, for example, national women’s parties competed at the local
levels as well. However, the percent that had local branches is almost
impossible to ascertain as the data are not reliably available.
One way to assess the depth of the relationship between the women’s
movements in these separate countries and women’s parties is to
consider the strength and autonomy of movements in these countries at
the time the parties were created. Data are not reliably available on these
features of women’s movements in all of the cases for all years, though
Htun and Weldon (2010) have created a scheme for coding the strength
and autonomy of feminist movements in many of these states for 1995
and 2005 using expert opinion. In six of the eight situations in which
feminist parties emerged (Belgium, Finland, Iceland, and Netherlands
as well as Switzerland, where there were two parties), the feminist
movement was regarded as strong, according to Htun and Weldon, and
in seven of the eight cases where feminist parties emerged (Belgium,
Finland, Germany, Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland), the feminist
movement was otherwise regarded as autonomous, organized outside of
established political institutions such as parties, rather than through
them. There are many other instances in which the feminist movement
was either strong, autonomous, or both but in which women’s parties did
not emerge, suggesting that strong movements organized independently
of other parties are a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to explain the
emergence of feminist parties. This also suggests that where women’s
movements are represented by mainstream and established institutions
such as political parties, as in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, and
Sweden, women’s parties are less likely to emerge.
Even more interesting is the fact that in 15 of the 16 women’s parties that
were not expressly feminist for which we have data, feminist movements in
those countries were also regarded as autonomous, though only 5 of the 15
were regarded as strong. Again, this would suggest that an autonomous
movement would be a necessary, though not sufficient, cause of a
women’s party. However, this is curious because an autonomous feminist
movement should not theoretically be related to a women’s party that is
not feminist (and sometimes even antifeminist) in the sense that a
movement is not likely to foster a party that does not reflect its values.
There may be a number of reasons for this. It may be that the party and
the movement do not overlap and these are separate phenomena that
covary due to another factor, such as the extent of autonomous
organizing in civil society as a whole. We would need either more data
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or a close examination of each individual case to know this, which is, for
now, beyond the scope of this article. A plausible alternative is that a
movement might use its most publicly palatable and popular elements in
creating a party, consciously eschewing the feminist label in order to
avoid alienating more mainstream supporters. In Northern Ireland, for
example, many in the women’s movement were feminist but the party
they created steered clear of the term in part to attract supporters who did
not identify with the label and in part to avoid being easily pigeon-holed
and dismissed by the other parties (Cowell-Meyers 2011). Adopting the
tactical garb of a political party may introduce a set of constraints on
movements about which issues they choose to emphasize and in which
ways.
In Germany, Slovenia, and Sweden, the parties ran candidates for
Europe as well as at the national level. These parties began at the
national level first and then grew to vie for seats at the EU level. These
parties also had greater durability, which suggests greater depth, than the
two parties (Greece and Spain) that only ran candidates at the European
level and only contested a single election. It is interesting to note that
women’s parties emerged in most of the countries with federal or
devolved parliaments, such as in the UK, Denmark/Greenland,
Switzerland, Russia, Germany and Belgium, and in all but Denmark/
Greenland, women’s parties contested elections at both national and
regional levels. Decentralized governments typically create more
opportunities for small parties and women’s parties appear to follow this
pattern.
Though most of the women’s parties were inconsequential to broader
election outcomes, women’s parties won seats in the national legislature
in seven instances between 1987 and 2007 (Armenia, Bulgaria, Iceland,
Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Switzerland). In addition, the NIWC
won seats at the regional level within Northern Ireland.
STATISTICAL FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS
To examine the conditions under which women’s parties emerged, I used
panel data logit estimates to test three models on the dependent variable
of whether or not in that given election year a women’s party was
registered at the national level (0 ¼ no women’s party, 1 ¼ at least one
women’s party). The first model includes the structural variables
identified in the literature on small and niche parties as predictive of
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their emergence.6 These results indicate that women’s parties fit the
pattern of emergence of other small parties in that a lower threshold to
win election, the greater number of parties in the system, and the use of
proportional representation predict a higher likelihood that a women’s
party will emerge. For example, countries with a PR electoral model were
nearly seven times as likely as countries with majoritarian electoral models
to produce a women’s party. This generic structural model’s lack of overall
explanatory power (R2
¼ .16), however, indicates the limitations of previous
scholarship in explaining when a women’s party would emerge.
Model 2 adds women-specific variables to the explanation for the
emergence of women’s parties. These variables include women’s
participation in the workforce, women’s descriptive representation in
parliament, and the presence or absence of a gender quota for
candidates for national office within any major party in the system. In
this model, all of the structural variables suggested by the extant
literature, except age of democracy, are significant and in the theorized
direction, as is women’s labor force participation, but whether there is a
party quota in place and women’s representation are not significant. This
gender-specific structural model improves the power of the explanation
by nearly .10 (R2
¼ .24) over the first, more generic model, suggesting
that women’s labor force participation is, in fact, an important element
in the explanation for the emergence of women’s parties. Increasing
women’s labor force participation by 1% increases the odds of a country
producing a women’s party by 18%.
The third model incorporates all of the above variables and introduces
two interaction terms designed to measure the effect of the asynchronism
between high economic empowerment and low political empowerment.
The first interaction term evaluates the combined effect of high women’s
participation in the labor force and low political representation. The
second measures the effect of high women’s participation in the labor
force and the absence of a party quota. The results show that all of the
theorized variables except age of democracy are significant and that all
but women’s descriptive representation are in the correct direction,
including the two interaction terms and major party quota.
In this full model women’s descriptive representation is significant and
positive (i.e., the more women in the legislature in the previous election,
the greater the odds of a women’s party emerging), which suggests that
6. In Ishiyama’s comparative study of 22 post-Communist states, structural factors like these were the
only variables found to be significantly related to the emergence of women’s party (2003).
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the theory of women’s parties emerging in situations where women are
underrepresented (H2) needs modification. However, the results of the
two interaction variables affirm the argument in H3 that women’s
underrepresentation through traditional mechanisms (i.e., the
mainstream parties, the presence of gender quotas) relative to their labor
force participation also matters to the emergence of women’s parties.
Taken together, these results from testing H12H3 build the profile of
women’s parties as the consequence of both high levels of women’s
empowerment and also frustration with imbalance in the pattern of
empowerment. The R2
of .30 confirms that this model offers a powerful
explanation for the emergence of women’s parties in Europe in this period.
Table 3 provides additional support for this argument about the
interaction of women’s economic and political empowerment. Of the 38
instances, 24 (or 63%) of the elections in which there was a women’s
party registered at the national level were situations in which women had
less than average (15.3%) representation in the previous parliament.
However, alluding to the explanatory power of women’s economic
participation, 74% (28) of these parties existed in situations where
women’s labor force participation was higher than average (50.4%), and
only 26% (10) of the elections in which women’s parties existed
occurred where less than 50% of women were working outside the
home. Of the 24 elections with women’s parties in which women had
less than 15% representation, 71% were also situations of women’s
relative economic empowerment. Of the 14 elections with women’s
parties that occurred where women had more than 15% representation,
79% were also situations of women’s relative economic empowerment.
Because the women’s parties in the established democracies of Western
Europe tended to be feminist and the parties from Eastern Europe did not,
Model 4 was designed to control for East versus West, using a dummy
variable and dropping age of democracy. Because all the structural
variables and the majority of the women-specific variables remain
significant, this model shows that women’s parties in the two regions,
despite their different characters, are explained by the same forces. The
one exception is whether or not a major party has a gender quota and
the interaction of this variable and women’s labor force participation.
This is likely a consequence of the fact that almost no parties in Eastern
Europe had female gender quotas through most of the time period of
the study.
Table 3 shows the effect of women’s labor force participation on the
likelihood of a party emerging in the full model in more detail. It shows
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that the predicted probabilities of a women’s party emerging increase as
women’s labor force participation increases. In addition, as indicated
above, the sign of the first interaction term, which models the gap
between labor force participation and women’s descriptive
representation, indicates that the gap, too, is significant and in the
correct direction to fit the theory.
Figure 1 unpacks the second interaction term by presenting the marginal
effects of a party quota on the likelihood of a women’s party for different
levels of women’s labor force participation. This figure confirms the
prediction that the effects of party on the probability of women’s party
emergence declines as women’s labor force participation increases.
CONCLUSIONS
Political parties and social movements are both central to the degree to
which groups are included in the state. Parties in particular are
considered the gatekeepers for women’s political representation; by
choosing to recruit, train, and advance female candidates, promote
women within internal structures in the party, or promote women’s
issues in their platforms, parties determine the levels of engagement and
opportunities for women in the political process. And, because the
behavior and policy commitments of parties are competitive and
contagious, the undertakings of even small and marginal parties have
been shown to be influential throughout multiparty political systems
(Harmel and Svasand 1997).
This article focuses on women’s parties, which have been almost entirely
neglected by both the literature on women’s movements and that on
political parties. The project develops the historical record for women’s
political parties in Europe in the past two decades, drawing from an
Table 3. Women’s parties by economic empowerment, controlling for political
empowerment
Political Empowerment (women’s descriptive
representation lagged by one election, percent)
Economic Empowerment (women’s
labor force participation, percent)
Below average Above average
Below average 29.17% (7) 21.43% (3) 26.32% (10)
Above average 70.83% (17) 78.57% (11) 73.68% (28)
100% (24) 100% (14) 100% (38)
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original longitudinal dataset that includes 38 countries in Europe from
1987 to 2007. The dataset shows that women’s parties are not common,
but they are not rare either. In fact, 30 such parties existed in 20
countries in this time period. Most of these parties were small, marginal,
FIGURE 1. Predicted probability of a women’s party, conditional on women’s
labor force participation. Dashed lines denote 95% confidence intervals.
Remaining covariates are set to their modes (categorical data) or means (interval
data). Estimates are based on Model 3.
FIGURE 2. Marginal effects of party quota on the probability of a women’s party,
conditional on women’s labor force participation. Dashed lines denote 95%
confidence intervals. Remaining covariates are set to their modes (categorical data)
or means (interval data). Estimates are based on Model 3.
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and short-lived, though some had a measurable impact on their societies.
Though they represented different sets of issues and constituencies of
women, these parties shared a common commitment to increase the
representation (substantive as well as descriptive) of women in their
respective states.
The article focuses on explaining the conditions under which these
parties emerged, arguing that women’s parties constitute a tactical choice
by women’s movements to contend with their exclusion from decision
making through such formal means. Women’s parties emerge under
similar structural conditions to other new parties, indicating that the
choice to form a party reflects rational calculations about strategic entry
into electoral politics by women’s movements. But the results here are
even more interesting. The descriptive data support the argument made
by Hug (2001) and Tavits (2008) that the impetus for new parties lies in
frustration with the established party system; women party leaders
frequently complained that the established parties excluded women from
decision making and ignored women’s interests. Though 63% of
women’s parties emerged in situations where women had less than 15%
representation in parliament, the quantitative data do not, however,
support the theory that women’s parties are more likely when women’s
parliamentary representation is relatively low. Instead, the data indicate
that women’s parties occur when women are empowered professionally,
through their work, and politically, in parliament. It is important to
recognize, however, that 90% of these countries had less than 33%
female representation, so the term “political empowerment” overstates
what access women had to decision-making roles. And, it must be
acknowledged that women’s representation in parliament is not a
complete picture of women’s political empowerment. But the data also
show that women’s parties are more likely where there is discrepancy
between the degree to which the political establishment empowers
women (through electoral opportunities or through gender quotas) and
the degree to which they participate in the workforce. This suggests that
where mainstream parties undertake efforts to include women at levels
consummate with their participation in the workforce, women’s parties
are less likely. Thus, women’s parties should be understood as
indications of failures in the established party system to adequately
incorporate women and as decisions of the movements to hybridize their
efforts and institutionalize protest against this pattern of exclusion. The
impetus for women’s parties is, the data reveal, fundamentally connected
to the marginalization of women.
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These findings allude to many avenues for further research. The dataset
focuses on Europe in part because I expected data to be easier to attain
there than in other regions of the world, but it leaves open the question
of whether similar patterns could be observed in other places, especially
where women’s empowerment in general is lower. Additional limitations
stem from the difficulty of attaining consistent and reliable information.
For example, it may be fruitful to consider additional measures of
women’s economic and political empowerment beyond those used here
in order to develop a more complete picture of this dynamic. The idea
that asymmetries in empowerment contribute to the formation of parties
of the marginalized also suggests that other groups may follow similar
paths to increase their access, and this calls for further research into the
formation of parties based on ethnicity, religion, linguistics, and so forth.
It may also suggest that the intersection of these parties and women’s
parties may be important; in other words, are women’s parties more or
less typical in situations where identity trumps ideology? Finally, this
project has not been able to tackle the deviling question of when
women’s parties are able to change the behavior of other parties versus
when they are less effective. I will leave the question of impact to a later
examination of particular case studies.
Kimberly Cowell-Meyers is Assistant Professor of Government at American
University, Washington, D.C.: kcowell@american.edu
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