WHAT IS A WOMEN'S PARTY?

In political science, parties are defined as “political organizations that explicitly recruit candidates to run for office” (Ishiyama Reference Ishiyama2003, 268); indeed, it is the nomination of candidates for public office that distinguishes parties from other organizations, such as interest groups or social movements (Sartori Reference Sartori1976). Hence, participation in elections, national or subnational, is a key element of a political party, whose primary goal is often to win seats. However, there is no single agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a women's party and how this might differ from our general understanding of political parties. Cowell-Meyers offers the most robust definition in her analysis of European parties: women's parties are “autonomous organizations of or for women that run candidates for elected office” to “advance the volume and range of women's voices in politics” (Reference Cowell-Meyers2016, 4).

Like Cowell-Meyers, we contend that women's parties are organizations whose central and defining purpose is to increase women's political representation. They differ, then, from political parties more broadly, whose principal goal is to recruit and run candidates for office. They are distinct from women's groups or caucuses in other established political parties because gender is the principal organizing strategy and focus of the whole party. And they are distinct from social movements because they register candidates, run for office, and produce election campaign manifestos. They are intentionally and consistently run by women, meaning that the majority of their members, candidates, staff, and leaders are female, which distinguishes them from political parties that may happen to have women in leadership positions. Finally, they typically define themselves as “women's parties,” rather than as parties that happen to be interested in women's issues, and they typically include either “women” or “feminist” in their party name.

Taking gender as their principal organizational and analytical focus, as well as the adoption of the word “women” in some party names, raises questions about the extent to which women are treated as a homogenous group. In other words, what role does intersectionality play, if any, within women's parties? The recognition of the ways in which our multiple identities intersect and shape our experiences of structural and political forms of oppression and marginalization (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1990) has had a transformative effect on women's movements around the world (Collins and Bilge Reference Collins and Bilge2016). Theoretically, it has influenced how we conceptualize gender by revealing the limitations of gender as a single-axis analytical category (McCall Reference McCall, Grabham, Cooper, Krishnadas and Herman2008).

MAPPING WOMEN'S PARTIES

To develop a comprehensive sense of where and when women's parties have emerged, we searched multiple electronic databases of news coverage, including LexisNexis, ProQuest Newsstand, Access World News, Factiva, Google News, and the archives of major newspapers in many countries as well as scholarly databases for references and case studies on women's parties. We also combed Princeton University's Constituency-Level Elections Archive, the Database of Political Institutions, Adam Carr's Election Archive, Dieter Nohlen's Elections Data Handbooks, Dawn Brancati's Global Elections Database, and regional elections databases for Africa, Latin America, and Europe, among other sources.

We used the narrowest framework for identifying women's parties using this method: keyword searches for “woman,” “women,” “feminist,” or “mother” in the party name in the elections databases (and the same words in other languages as appropriate) and “women's party” or “feminist party” in the scholarly and news databases, although we included only parties whose title included “women” or “feminist” in the total counts and graphics. In every instance, we verified the existence of the party through the electoral record to ensure that parties that were founded in principle but either never ran or have not yet run candidates were not included.Footnote ¹ For example, the U.S. National Women's Party fits the naming scheme but never ran candidates for office.

Once we identified a party, we used the party name to gather data about the party's manifesto, electoral platforms, ideology, history, leadership, electoral outcomes, and linkages with other groups in society, using scholarly and news databases and internet search engines. This allowed us to grasp the commonalities between women's parties and the range of party types.

We found that women's parties are neither a new phenomenon nor a rare one. Instead, we found political parties with “woman”/“women” or “feminist” in their title that register candidates for elections at the national level in almost every region of the world (see Figure 1). They are most common in Europe, where at least 50 have emerged, and least common in Latin America (see Figure 2). Their existence also stretches across most of the history of modern democracy, first appearing in the early twentieth century and in some cases emerging before statehood was consolidated (e.g., Israel) and women's suffrage was practiced (e.g., Argentina's National Feminist Party). They emerged in the greatest numbers in the 1990s: some of this surge is undoubtedly attributable to the breakup of the former Soviet Union and to the dramatic disruption in party systems that accompanied the first set of elections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia after the end of the Cold War (see Figure 3). Curiously, there are some states in which multiple women's parties have emerged, although they are not usually coterminous; rather, earlier women's parties set a precedent for later forms of mobilization (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Map of women's parties.

Figure 2.

Women's parties by region.

Figure 3.

Women's party emergence.

Women's parties tend to be small, earning less than 4% of the vote, and thus they secure few parliamentary seats; there are, however, some interesting exceptions to this, such as in Iceland, where Kwenna Listen earned 10% of the vote, and Armenia, where the Shamiram Women's Party attracted 17% of the vote in a single election. The parties also are typically short-lived, although, again, there are examples of women's parties that have greater longevity, including the German Feminist Party, which campaigned in national and European Union elections for more than 20 years; the Gabriela Women's Party in the Philippines, which has won seats in five congresses; and the Seikatsusha Network (Netto) in Japan (see Shin Reference Shin2019), which, campaigning at the local level, has had more than 500 deputies elected nationwide in the last two decades.

The number of women's parties that we present is not exhaustive. Indeed, there may be, or previously have been, more women's parties than we uncovered searching only by party name. In fact, pinpointing the total numbers across the globe is virtually impossible, as we encounter the classic problem that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. In other words, we must approach these figures cautiously. For instance, this decade's numbers do not include recent parties formed in Finland and Denmark, or one that appears to be on the verge of forming in Italy, as these parties have not had the opportunity to run candidates in national elections. Thus, even though it appears there has been a decline in new women's parties emerging recently, the data for this decade almost certainly undercount the total number of parties that will have appeared by 2020. The point, in short, is that women's parties are not disappearing. At least 10 new parties have appeared in every decade since the 1980s; indeed, the phenomenon seems to be spreading across Europe, where new women's parties have emerged in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, all within the past 12 years.

It is also, of course, extremely difficult to analyze whether the parties, particularly the historical parties, have adopted an intersectional approach to their political recruitment strategies, and in particular whether they have fielded diverse slates of women candidates. Moreover, it is difficult to assess the extent to which they have appealed to a diverse range of voters. The articles in this symposium explore these intersectional dimensions to evaluate the extent to which individual women's parties have approached gender and women as monolithic categories.

WOMEN'S PARTIES AS A FAMILY

From the frequency and scope of women's parties, it is clear that the idea of a women's party holds value as a means and method of political organizing. Women's parties are in some ways distinct from other groups of political parties; as such, we argue, they constitute a separate party family. Despite the existence of different types of women's parties, we argue that as a group, they share enough points of commonality to be considered a separate and coherent party family.

Party families are the customary way in which scholars of comparative parties describe political parties and understand party competition, particularly in Europe, where the main frameworks for categorizing party families have emerged. The literature on party families is grounded in Stein Rokkan's (Reference Rokkan1970) classic work on socioeconomic cleavages of the modern era, which links the main parties in Western Europe to different ideological and sociological positions emerging from the cleavages that Rokkan describes (see Von Beyme Reference Von Beyme1985; Seiler Reference Seiler1980). As Mair and Mudde (Reference Mair and Mudde1998) explain, scholars tend to assign parties to party families based on either their sociological origins or “genetics” (see Gallagher, Laver, and Mair Reference Gallagher, Laver and Mair1995), transnational organization, ideology and/or policy positions, or party name or self-concept. We argue that women's parties may best be understood as constituting a distinct party family, one with a clear genetic path, ideology, and naming pattern.Footnote ²

The genetics of a party refer to what the party is, based at least partly on how or why it emerged. Parties in the same family are those “that mobilized in similar historical circumstances or with the intention of representing similar interests” (Gallagher, Laver, and Mair Reference Gallagher, Laver and Mair1995, 181). Women's parties tend to have both aspects of this categorization:

• • They typically emerge out of the leadership of a women's movement or in close association with a recognizable social movement organization of the women's movement. As movement-party hybrids such as green parties or pro-family parties, they share similar sociological origins.

• • Women's parties are typically based upon a shared group identity. Gender, along with other identity markers such as race, ethnicity, and sexuality, is a socially constructed characteristic, imbued with distinct social experiences within a structural matrix of oppression (Collins Reference Collins2000). Marginalized social groups have been oppressed as well as historically excluded from decision-making processes (Young Reference Young1990, Reference Young2000); therefore, women's parties constitute a political expression of social group politics. However, as we note earlier, this tends to be approached on a single axis rather than an intersectional approach.

• • They represent similar interests in advancing women's political representation, descriptively, symbolically, and substantively. Though the issues of women's substantive representation differ across country contexts, women's parties almost always have an “explicit agenda to advance the volume and range of women's voices in politics” (Cowell-Meyers Reference Cowell-Meyers2016, 4). While for some, this is tied explicitly to an intersectional commitment, for others, the focus remains on aggregate numbers.

• • The emergence of women's parties is commonly linked to their opposition or reaction to mainstream parties. Within the party family literature, this posture of defiance or opposition is critical in the formation of separate categories of families; social democratic parties emerge in opposition to the bourgeois system, liberals against predemocratic regimes, and so on. Women's parties tend to present themselves as an alternative to established party politics that neglect, or at least are perceived to neglect, women in terms of descriptive and substantive representation. Accordingly, they inextricably link their emergence, and their very existence, to the failure of other parties to include women or give sufficient attention to women's concerns (see Evans and Kenny in this issue). Indeed, it is the perception that existing parties have failed to address women's issues sufficiently that is critical, especially when we consider that women's parties have emerged in relatively egalitarian and inclusive Nordic countries (see Cowell-Meyers Reference Cowell-Meyers2017) as well as in contexts such as the United Kingdom, where mainstream political parties have sought to address women's descriptive and substantive representation (Evans and Kenny Reference Evans and Kenny2019b).

• • Women's parties also commonly evolve in contexts where women have achieved a certain degree of economic advancement, through their labor force participation, but simultaneously lack parallel corresponding political power (see Cowell-Meyers Reference Cowell-Meyers2016). The discrepancy can be of different degrees (e.g., the Feminist Initiatives in both Sweden and Norway have emerged in contexts where women's descriptive representation is relatively high), but Cowell-Meyers (Reference Cowell-Meyers2016) finds strong statistically significant evidence of these patterns in European states. Most importantly, the theory and narrow empirical evidence suggest that they are not likely to emerge where women have little economic power. They are, instead, products of historical circumstances that empower women unequally across sectors.

• • Women's parties are also linked ideologically. Though ideology is often simplified to a left-right positioning, ideology is more appropriately conceived of as “a body of normative or normative-related ideas about the nature of man[kind] and society as well as the organization and purposes of society” (Sainsbury Reference Sainsbury1980, 8). Commonality of norms and principles creates a spiritual association or ethos across party families (see Von Beyme Reference Von Beyme1985). The ideology of women's parties reflects a desire for gender equality, meaning that women and men should have equal citizenship rights, and a pro-women perspective on social justice. These parties demand greater access to power for women and greater inclusion of women in the political sphere.

• • Their principal analytical tools center on gender, as opposed to other cleavages (i.e., class, religion, center-periphery, national identity, etc.). While a subset of women's parties are avowedly feminist in the sense of “challenging patriarchy,” all women's parties use a gendered analysis, focusing on women's experiences of marginalization and exclusion. For some parties, such as the Feminist Initiative, this focus encompasses an intersectional approach to gender that is missing from the analytical approach of other parties (e.g., the Netto).

• • Women's parties can be found on both the left and right of the political spectrum (e.g., the Gabriela Women's Party, the German Feminist Party, and many of the parties discussed in this symposium would categorize themselves as left of center versus the National Party for Hungarian Mothers or the Netto), though they are more commonly left leaning. Some women's parties also pointedly avoid taking stances on typical cleavage issues, such as taxation, monetary policy, or foreign policy (e.g., the U.K. Women's Equality Party), deeming these divisive and a distraction from their core objectives; as such, women's parties offer a “third dimension” outside of traditional class-based or left-right dichotomies (see Kwenna Listen in Iceland).

• • Their organizational structures are typically designed to empower women.

  • ○ Often, they are led by women and their primary activists are female. Though they may occasionally run sympathetic male candidates, women's parties usually nominate and campaign exclusively on behalf of female candidates.

  • ○ They typically embrace distinct organizational approaches that aim for consultative leadership, decentralized decision-making and horizontal organization, although there are exceptions to this (Evans and Kenny Reference Evans and Kenny2019b).

• • Finally, women's parties can be considered a party family in the sense that they tend to self-identify as such through their name or party label. Using party name as a means to access identity is a common mechanism in the scholarship (see Von Beyme Reference Von Beyme1985) and using this approach for women's parties lacks the weaknesses of doing so for other party families. As Mair and Mudde (Reference Mair and Mudde1998) note, parties of the left and right have chosen to call themselves a variety of names, and labels such as “liberal” or “people's” conceal diversity among parties using these terms in their self-labeling. However, almost all women's parties use either “women” or “feminist” (more rarely, “mothers”) in their party name. (The Netto in Japan is an exception, though its name, “life-maker,” clues us in to the primacy of the concept of gender in its self-understanding.)

This list of commonalities across women's parties includes some core features and some typical but not necessary dynamics for membership within the party family. The essential characteristics of parties within this party family are their association with the women's movement, their focus on women's representation, their analytical focus on gender, and their commitment to empowering women through leadership. Consistent with Mair and Mudde (Reference Mair and Mudde1998), we thus prioritize party origins or genetics and ideology over name or other mechanisms for delimiting the category of women's parties.

Our contention that women's parties should be designated as a party family, like “Christian democratic,” “social democrat,” or “agrarian” parties, derives not just from the fact that they share commonalities with each other but from the idea that these commonalities distinguish them from mainstream parties that articulate a similar agenda but “do not make the condition of women their primary concern” (Weldon Reference Weldon2002, 80). The essence of women's parties cannot be adequately conceptualized when they are seen as indistinct from established parties or grouped with other left-libertarian parties (see Kitschelt Reference Kitschelt1988) that do not share their identity or sociological origins. To consider women's parties as a distinct party family is also important because it offers analytical opportunities to evaluate when, how, and why they emerge in comparative contexts; how the fortunes and alliances of the party family evolve over time; and what their emergence reveals about a party system's fragmentation, particularization, and inclusion.

WHY WOMEN'S PARTIES MATTER

As discussed earlier, women's parties have emerged in a wide variety of contexts across time and space. Given that these parties typically dissolve relatively quickly, regardless of the electoral and party system within which they operate, it is, perhaps, not obvious why we should be interested in them. We argue that women's parties constitute important organizations, and that they are worthy of study for a number of political and sociological reasons:

1. 1. Their emergence tells us about gender and power.

2. 2. Their connections with civil society groups can reveal the strength of women's movements.

3. 3. Their engagement, if any, with intersectionality reveals the extent to which gender is conceived as a single-axis category.

4. 4. They can recruit women to political activism.

5. 5. They can have an impact on both the descriptive and substantive representation of women and women's interests.

6. 6. They provide a visible disruption to the androcentric coding of politician as male.

7. 7. They provide an opposition to the rising backlash to gender equality articulated by populist and far right parties.

We explore these reasons in greater detail next.

Women's parties matter because they tell us something about gender relations and power inequalities within a society. As mentioned earlier, women's parties typically emerge in contexts in which women are unevenly empowered; hence, their emergence within a political system is just one indicator of a society in which men dominate. And, though women do not share equally in political, social, and economic power in any society, women's parties do not emerge everywhere. Political mobilization around gender is thus curious and deserves exploration. When a women's party emerges, it is typically because other parties have failed to take women's issues seriously, or at least there is a perception that they have failed to take women's issues seriously. Women's parties are formed because women feel that their voices are not being heard in the decision-making process; this absence is interpreted as a democratic deficit—one that those who form women's parties believe existing parties are incapable of addressing. For example, Kwenna Frambothid and Kwenna Listen emerged because of a sense of anger regarding the absence of women in Iceland's social power base (Dominelli and Jonsdottir Reference Dominelli and Jonsdottir1988).

Even given a perception that the party system is neglecting women's issues, this only fulfils the demand side of the equation; women's parties do not emerge without the availability of supply-side actors. Women's parties typically emerge alongside or out of women's movement politics, making them, in theory, more accountable and directly related to grassroots activism. These origins are important and can have a particular impact on the ways in which women's parties do politics. When a women's party emerges, it can tell us something about the relative strength of the women's movement in a given context. Setting up a political party and running for office require significant resources, in terms of attracting sufficient numbers of activists as well as ample material resources. Therefore, if a women's party emerges, it could be read as an indicator that there is also likely to be an active women's movement. For instance, the Canadian Feminist Party was established by activists to work in cooperation with the various women's groups, associations, and coalitions to challenge the political systems and structures that were designed by men for men (Zaborszky Reference Zaborszky1987).

Women's parties are important symbolically in terms of what they can reveal about the conceptualization of gender. After all, in some cases, women's parties could be the sole political actors discussing gender and women's issues. The extent to which they engage with intersectionality, which has heralded a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of identity and power (Hancock Reference Hancock2007), tells us about the extent to which they are engaged in pursuing a politics that recognizes the importance of diversity among and between women. Indeed, who they recruit to stand as candidates, who their members are, and the extent to which they try to appeal to a diverse range of women is critical in terms of their ability to claim to be able to represent all women. Indeed, some parties have struggled with the idea of intersectionality (see Evans and Kenny in this issue), a struggle that can be driven both by a failure to recognize the importance of differences between women and by a belief that the term women will automatically appeal to all women. This has important implications because if a women's party does not acknowledge difference, then it may dissuade other parties from adopting a more intersectional approach.

Women's parties matter because they have an impact. While it is rare that women's parties achieve much by way of electoral success, they are able to influence the agendas of existing political parties, especially with regard to the descriptive representation of women and the substantive representation of women's issues and interests. While they are able to have a contagion effect through their presence in tight electoral races, they are typically best placed to influence other parties by raising the agenda of women's issues in order to embarrass existing parties into taking up the issue of women's representation and specific policy issues. For instance, the Israeli Women's Party, founded in 1977, claimed that influencing the election manifestos and campaigns of existing parties was one of their primary goals (Levin Reference Levin1999). Moreover, Cowell-Meyers's (Reference Cowell-Meyers2011, Reference Cowell-Meyers2014, Reference Cowell-Meyers2017) work demonstrates that in Northern Ireland and Sweden, the emergence of women's parties changed the election platforms and public statements of the mainstream parties.

Women's parties have the potential to disrupt androcentric images of politics through the promotion of women candidates and women legislators. Challenging gendered perceptions surrounding the role of a politician, women's parties have an important role to play in demonstrating that women also “do politics.”Footnote ³ Women forming their own party sends a message to other women that politics is not just an activity for men, and that, in turn, has the potential to encourage other women to run for office. It also places pressure on mainstream parties to position women more visibly in their campaigns, run female candidates, and run them in winnable seats. For example, according to news coverage at the time, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC) “sent the other parties scrambling for women within their ranks to push in front of the cameras” (Haughey Reference Haughey1997). As Cowell-Meyers (Reference Cowell-Meyers2011, 14) demonstrates, the emergence of the NIWC contributed to increases in the number of and seriousness of female candidates in local and parliamentary elections. As Shin explains in this issue, the Japanese Netto uses a reconceptualization of politics to recruit women in local communities; adopting a rotation rule and term limits for the delegates, the party engages women who would normally think of themselves as far from “professional politics,” putting forward, in contrast, an “amateur politics” and altering the boundaries of the political.

In addition to encouraging other women to run for office, women's parties can also perform an educative function by introducing women to politics and to political activism. In contexts in which politics is explicitly coded as a male activity, levels of political knowledge among women might be expected to be lower, given that they are either formally or informally excluded from the political process. Women's parties can provide an introduction to politics, especially to women with lower levels of educational attainment or with little knowledge or experience of the political process. For instance, women were more likely than men to vote for the Women for Russia Party, which was particularly attractive to younger, less educated women (Ishiyama Reference Ishiyama2003). Some women's parties also have explicit agendas to rethink the boundaries of the political and engage women in the political process through nontraditional pathways. Kwenna Frambothid in Iceland, for example, used theater, visual arts, economic exchange, and its public services around rape and domestic violence to engage women in their network (see Alla Kristin Einarsdottir's Reference Einarsdottir2015 documentary The Kitchen Sink Revolution). The Netto also used the unusual pathway of collective bargaining around environmentally friendly household products to link women to formal politics.

Finally, we argue that in a context in which populist and far-right parties are on the rise, coupled with a backlash against gender equality policies (Verloo Reference Verloo2018), women's parties have a particularly important role to play in contesting anti-women narratives. The fact that they are political parties matters. Parties, as legal entities, have institutional resources that movements do not. They are able to formally contest discourse, ideas, and policies through the production of election manifestos, during debates, and through the media's coverage of elections. Their status as a party gives them a platform from which they can directly challenge those who seek to promote regressive policies that will be harmful for women and other minority groups. The translation of social movement politics into party politics offers a critical means by which to champion issues that matter to women.

In this section, we have made the case for studying women's parties as important gendered organizations. However, while we can note the achievements of individual parties, how do we conceive of them in terms of comparative research? We now turn our attention to the idea of women's parties as a distinct party family, an approach that allows us to undertake more systematic comparative research. Moreover, the adoption and adaption of this framework will allow us to promote the study of women's parties among party scholars and those interested in gender and politics who have hitherto largely neglected their existence.

THEMATIC OVERVIEW

In this article, we have explored the study of women's political parties. We have reflected on what constitutes a women's party, mapped the prevalence of women's parties across time and space, set out the case for considering them as a distinct party family, and explained why they are important organizations worthy of study. In this final section of the article, we draw out some of the thematic questions that arise from the case studies included in this symposium of Politics & Gender. The articles touch on ideas we have explored here and raise six important conceptual, empirical, and methodological challenges for understanding women's political parties: How do we distinguish between different types of women's parties? What role do, and should, men play in women's parties? How should we study women's parties? How intersectional are women's parties? Are women's parties effective? Do women's parties operate differently to other types of parties? Finally, we add to the questions raised in the articles by asking why women's parties are so short-lived, arguing that to understand their emergence, organization, and impact, it is necessary to understand the conditions in which they dissipate.