Gendered Competitive Interaction and Women's Executive Electoral Success

This paper focuses on women’s access to executive governing power, specifically on women’s selection as prime minister in parliamentary systems with cabinet government in West Europe. First, I review the pattern of women’s executive power across the past half century, to establish a descriptive foundation. Second, I discuss the pattern of women’s executive power in prime ministerships, in comparison to presidencies. Third, I identify the conditions under which a woman is likely to become a prime minister and develop a research design for testing these conditions. I discuss the particularities of ascension to prime minister in parliamentary democracies, and investigate two conditions that create an opening for a woman’s rise to prime ministerial power: 1) a scandal or major electoral failure that removes a male party leader and his leadership team; and 2) the désistement, or candidacy deferral, of quality male replacements in conditions of uncertainty. I argue that it is not just the behavior of political women that advances them to executive office; it is also the behavior of male politicians in specific crisis circumstances that creates the political opportunity. In a preliminary examination of these links, I focus on two cases of women’s executive succession and the process by which each approached executive power: Angela Merkel (Federal Republic of Germany) and Margaret Thatcher (Great Britain)