Do Ethnic Parties Exclude Women?

Do parties that represent ethnic minorities tend to exclude women? There are several reasons to think that this may be the case. First, the comparatively smaller size of ethnic parties could exclude women, especially under proportional representation. Second, the subcultures of many ethnic minorities are often more patriarchal than the majority culture, and thus parties representing such groups may include fewer women. Finally, an ideological fixation on ethnicity within ethnic parties may marginalize submi norities within the target group. Using a new crossnational data set, the authors examine the degree to which ethnic parties represent women, controlling for party size, electoral systems, gender quotas, ideology, and democratic development. Findings show that ethnic parties, particularly those appealing to a religious minority, tend to elect fewer women, but only under proportional representation electoral systems. Keywords women’s representation, ethnic parties, intersectionality, electoral systems Do parties that explicitly represent ethnic minorities (referred to here as ethnic parties) tend to exclude women? There are good reasons to presume that this may be the case. Scholarship on intersectionality—the intersectio