Politics: The Importance Of Gender In Politics

This essay will examine the importance of gender in politics. It will analyse the theories that aim to explain the vastly lower rate of female political representation and the factors that aid in increasing the number of female representatives from both the supply and demand side. It will discuss the differences in voting behaviour based on gender in particular focusing on how women vote in terms of policy, which gender is more responsive to certain policy changes and why there seems to have been a shift from a conservative to liberal political stance for women. This essay will primarily focus on America (both the United States and countries within Latin America); however it will make reference to a number of other countries (most of which are advanced democracies).

For years

With a change in public opinion, the expectation is that women would now be more willing to enter into the political fray. In the 2009 Latinobarométro (cited in Htun and Piscopo, 2014) people were asked whether they felt men were better political leaders than women. The majority of respondents in Latin America either disagreed or strongly disagreed with this sentiment, however in Ecuador this was not the case. If the theory that female participation increases with changing public opinion on women in politics, we would expect that the Latin American countries with favourable societal views would have a higher rate of female political participation than countries where public opinion wasn’t as favourable such as Ecuador. However, when we examine the data, the Ecuadorian executive is approximately 25% women, while a number of the other Latin American countries (El Salvador, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic) fall below 15%. It seems then that it is not possible to simply view female political participation as a result of public opinion, but rather as a result of a number of