Political polarization is one of the foremost challenges of our time. Research from the University of Exeter suggests that electing more female politicians could help to mitigate those risks and generally reduce the levels of hostility in politics.
Voters who support opposing parties tend to view political parties with a higher number of female representatives more favorably. This is in contrast to the growing trend of political polarization, which has led to increased hostility and mistrust across party lines in many countries.
Crossing the divide
This was found by researchers who analyzed data on the representation of women in 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017, in conjunction with survey data on people’s perceptions of opposing political parties.
The research was based on a dataset of women’s representation in political parties in 20 Western nations, including the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Israel, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and France. It was combined with survey data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).
The findings revealed that both male and female voters had a more positive perception of parties that they typically do not support if those parties had a higher number of female MPs. Furthermore, parties led by men – which made up 75% of the parties studied – were viewed even more favorably by political opponents if they nominated more women to their delegations.
Greater diversity
“Our research shows increasing women’s parliamentary presence could mitigate cross-party hostility and help boost feelings of efficacy and trust towards politicians,” the researchers explain. “This shows that by nominating and electing more women MPs, parties can broaden their electoral appeal and defuse affective polarization while also providing better descriptive gender representation. There is a danger though that radical right-wing parties could use women’s representation to enhance their affective standing in the general public.”
The study included data from 125 political parties, where on average 29% of the delegations were women. Researchers used a 0 to 10 point scale, where 0 represents maximum dislike and 10 represents maximum liking of the opposing party, to measure voters’ evaluations of opposing parties. They found that increasing the proportion of women MPs from 13% to 45% improved voters’ evaluations of that political party by 0.55 points on the 10-point scale.
“When political parties nominate and elect more women, opposing party supporters tend to evaluate that party more positively,” the researchers conclude. “This was true throughout the time period of the study, despite the shift across this period to a greater reliance on online campaigning, where partisan hostility can be particularly mobilized by racist and sexist memes.”
