The before and now: a political-partisan analysis of women’s electoral success in elections for state and district deputy

Abstract

Representation is considered a topic of paramount importance for Political Science, having joined the issue of gender to contest the existing inequality between men and women in representative institutional environments. Considering the under-representation of women in politics, the following problem arises: “Has the mandatory gender electoral quota contributed to a significant increase in the success of female candidacies at the subnational level?”. From this, the article aims to analyze the electoral success of women in the position of state and district deputy between the years 2006 to 2018. It is argued that the subnational field is also an important sphere for understanding the issue of representation, being it is important to understand the variations of women in this area that is still little studied. The research is classified as an observational study of time series and is divided into two parts: literature review and statistical-descriptive analysis. Secondary data were collected on the website of the Superior Electoral Court and are divided into: number of women and men candidates and elected, as well as party and regional patterns of candidacies. It was concluded that the mandatory gender electoral quota generated an increase only in the number of female candidacies, which did not directly affect the electoral success of the candidates, since the number of women elected to the position of state and district deputy remained unchanged. stable between 2006 and 2018. Despite this, there were variations in regional and party parameters over the years, which are relevant to the subject studied.