The SISP conference 2023 was a great occasion to present our work-in-progresses and discuss them with national and international colleagues! Our research group participated with several contributions that you can find below
Valeria Resta & Andrea Cassani, Women’s political empowerment. An assessment of the extant measures and trends
Abstract
Women political empowerment is a desirable political result both in itself and instrumentally. Grater political equality between men and women not only improves the quality of democracy for the greater inclusion it implies, but also because of the better policy outcomes that comes from having more representativeness within decision making bodies.
In the last decades, many efforts have been put in trying to measure women political empowerment, yet, the extant measures do not seem to adhere to its very conceptualization. Most of them focus their attention only some aspect of women political empowerment failing to deal with its complexity and multidimensionality and none of them include some of the features pinpointed as part of women political empowerment, like for instance those related women’s motivational assumptions and participation in politics. Taking stock of the scholarly debate in one hand and of its empirical application in the other one, this paper proposes GENPOLEMP index of women political empowerment that covers all the dimensions and the features of women political empowerment by introducing new indicators to those already in use. We have then estimates the index on a dataset of European countries from 2000 to 2021.
Massimo Prearo & Federico Trastulli, Trajectories and Careers of LGBTIQ+ Politicians in a Traditional Context: the Italian Case Study
Abstract
Until the 2000s, there were only few known cases of elected gay, lesbian, and transgender people, exclusively at the parliamentary level and members of left and center-left parties or coalitions. In the last local elections of 2021, however, more than twenty LGBTIQ+ candidates were elected, i.e. candidates who have made their LGBTIQ+ identity a characterizing dimension of their profile. Although often isolated cases, moreover, even LGBTIQ+ members of the parliament (at both the Italian and European levels) are no longer scandalous exceptional profiles. More generally, LGBTIQ+ elected politicians are coming out increasingly in the left and center-left as well as in the right and center-right. A liberal and green “Gay Party” has even appeared in 2020. Research interested in LGBTIQ+ politicians generally focuses on their effects on representation or their role in adopting specific public policies. Few works have studied the trajectories and political careers of such candidates and, relatedly, the factors within the party and electoral systems that either favor or hinder such careers. The paper proposes a case study analysis of LGBTIQ+ elected politicians in Italy. Research on political careers has epistemological and methodological issues related to the difficulty of combining actor and context-oriented approaches. Thus, the research objective is twofold: to analyze the contextual factors that constitute the political ecology within which LGBTIQ+ elected politicians develop their career strategically; and to study the factors that characterize individual trajectories and profiles. Contextual factors to be explored mainly refer to the selection and the organizational structures of the parties or civic lists to which LGBT politicians are affiliated; the degree of party-political integration; and the strategies and modalities of electoral campaigning at different levels (local, national and European). At the individual level, the research will analyze the influence of activist career, as well as, in general, the relationship to LGBT activism and movements; and the socio-biographical profile. Accordingly, through a mixed individual and context-oriented qualitative approach, the research aims to contribute to building a theoretical model of how LGBTIQ+ political opportunity structures promote and hinder LGBTIQ+ political careers.
Eugenio Salvati, Francesco Baraldi & Pamela Pansardi, Assessing obstacles and inequalities in women’s political leadership in Italy. A subnational perspective
Abstract
The paper aims to investigate the gendered dimension of political careers in the Italian case by focusing on the sub-national level. By introducing a feminist institutionalist perspective in the study of political careers, we will address the gendered mechanisms of élite selection processes, which involves crucial questions that strictly pertain to the issue of change and continuity of political elites at the regional level. In particular, the increasing presence of female candidates in political arenas is an intrinsic challenge to the preservation of existing elites’ configurations, which may respond by reinforcing systemic obstacles to elite turnover. Thanks to an original dataset, we will systematically study the career of female politicians with regard to socio-demographic backgrounds and political expertise; party affiliation; type and number of positions held. Specifically, the paper will investigate the access (and circulation) to the position of regional ministers of female politicians. The analysis will cover all the Italian regions in the period 1995 – 2018. By investigating the effect of the different sets of factors on the chances to gain access to leadership positions of male and female politicians, we will ascertain the presence of gendered obstacles to political careers and to observe the existence of different patterns of career related to gender in a peculiar political-institutional setting like the regional one.
Pamela Pansardi, Andrea Cassani & Eugenio Salvati, Gender equality in political leadership in the European Parliament: a preliminary analysis
AbstractWomen’s parliamentary presence has significantly increased worldwide in the last two decades, but has not been matched yet by a comparable increase in their access to positions of power and leadership within main political institutions. While some important steps have been taken at the EU level, where three of the main institutions – European Commission, European Parliament, European Central Bank – are currently chaired by a woman, only four of the EU27 states currently have a female chief executive, and the average rate of female ministers and junior ministers in national governments remains below 30 percent. The European Parliament is a perfect example of this paradox: with a 41% of female MEPs, it scores quite high comparatively in terms of women’s representation. Yet, recent literature suggests the persistence of obstacles to women’s access in leadership positions within the EP. Overall, few studies have specifically investigated the hurdles that prevent female politicians to access higher political offices in the condition of a critical mass. To contribute filling this gap, the paper investigates the gender dimension of political careers in a multilevel context by taking into account both the institutional and individual-level factors that might hinder – or favor – female politicians’ access to positions of leadership within the EP. To study the presence of gender-based differences in the appointment to leadership positions, we rely on an original dataset, covering career paths and appointments of all MEPs (1979-2022), that allows to control the effect of gender in relation to political experience, ideology, and appointment rules on the access to apical (EP president, Committee chair) and deputy (Vice-president, Committee vice-chair) leadership positions.
Roundtable
Genere, leadership e cambiamento istituzionale in Italia
Co-organized by the standing group on Gender and Politics, standing group on Candidate and Leader Selection, and standing group on Government, Parliament and Representation
Speakers:
Donatella Campus – Università di Bergamo
Rita Falaschi – Rete di donne per la politica
Costanza Hermanin – European University Institute
Bruno Marino – Università LUISS Guido Carli
Pamela Pansardi – Università di PaviChairs: Elisabetta De Giorgi. Selena Grimaldi, Massimo Prearo
