Editorial introduction: Gender and political financing

Abstract

Contesting elections is extremely expensive. The need for money excludes many prospective candidates, resulting in the over-representation of wealth within politics. The cost of contesting elections has been underestimated as a cause of women’s under-representation. Covering seven case studies in six papers, this special issue makes theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding how political financing is gendered. We look at the impact on candidates, arguing that the personal costs of running for office can be prohibitive, and that fundraising is harder for female challengers. We also explore the role of political parties, looking at when and how parties might introduce mitigating measures to support female candidates with the costs of running. We demonstrate how political institutions shape the cost of running for office, illustrate how this is gendered and consider the potential consequences of institutional reform. We also note how societal gender norms can have financial repercussions for women candidates.

Introduction

Money is power, and power is very difficult to access without money. Contesting elections is a very costly affair that compels many candidates around the world to have, and/or raise, large sums of money. Even in countries with public financing and regulation of election expenses, candidates face time and opportunity costs when they invest in running for office (Nelson, 2000; Scarrow, 2007; Shames et al., 2020; Van Biezen, 2008). In many countries, some or all of the cost of elections falls on candidates themselves and on private donors (Ohman, 2012). The influence of private wealth on public elections poses a serious democratic dilemma, with politics becoming the preserve of the rich. If only wealthy candidates can afford to run then vast swathes of society are effectively excluded from the democratic process (Bueno and Dunning, 2017; Carnes, 2018; Carnes and Lupu, 2016; Grumbach et al., 2020; Wüest and Pontusson, 2017). And if candidates owe their political success to private donors, opportunities for corruption abound as wealthy individuals seek to purchase political influence (Norris, 2017; Norris and Abel van Es, 2016; Overton, 2004).

Not only is politics dominated by the rich, but it is also dominated by men. This is not coincidental; around the world, men have more money, influence and power than women (Paxton et al., 2020). Gender gaps in resources make it easier for men than women to fund their own campaigns for office and run as candidates, contributing to the global over-representation of men in office (Ballington and Kahane, 2014; Cigane and Ohman, 2014). Men are also in a stronger position to contribute financially to other people’s campaigns. Although not all literature on fundraising finds a gender gap, there is some evidence that men form the majority of donors and contribute larger sums to campaigns (Barber et al., 2016; Burrell, 1985; Swers and Thomson, 2020). This means that men are more likely to wield power directly (through being in office) and indirectly (through bankrolling those who end up in office). The gender gap in campaign donations also has repercussions for women who run for office. There is a homosocial dimension to fundraising, with men obtaining a larger proportion of their campaign donations from other men, and women from other women (Swers and Thomson, 2020). This is partly due to men’s access to powerful networks from which women are excluded, enabling them to tap wealthy male donors (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu, 2013). It is also due to women’s greater motivation to support women candidates (Burrell, 2003). However, if men donate more money, more often, then women face a greater challenge in raising funds for their campaign (Tolley et al., 2020). The consequence is that women have to work harder to raise equivalent funds to their male rivals, leaving them with less time for other things (Jenkins, 2007). There is also evidence of intersectional fundraising gaps, with women of color facing greater disadvantage (Grumbach et al., 2020; Sorensen and Chen, 2021).

Addressing gender gaps in access to resources is a considerable challenge. In recent years, there has been a growing raft of initiatives to support women’s access to politics using financial levers (Muriaas et al., forthcoming a). Money can serve as a strategic tool for enhancing women’s access to politics in a number of ways. These include giving direct financial support to female candidates; waiving certain costs for women running for office; giving political parties financial incentives (in the form of rewards or penalties) to recruit more women candidates; and providing financial assistance for programs to support women’s access to politics, such as training schemes. For example, EMILY’s List in the US gives financial support to pro-choice Democratic women running for office to help launch their campaigns. In Malawi and Ghana, gendered electoral financing initiatives such as discounted filing fees have been used to support women candidates (Muriaas et al., 2020). In Chile, the state provides financial assistance to female candidates directly and via parties who nominate them (Piscopo et al., 2021). In France, political parties are penalized through a reduction in their state funding if they do not respect the country’s parity quota. The French example inspired the use of financial incentives in two of the countries explored in this special issue: Ireland, where parties are financially penalized for failing to implement a quota, and South Korea, where parties are given a financial reward for successful quota implementation. Finally, candidate training schemes are used in various countries around the world to boost women’s preparedness for office (Piscopo, 2020).

While there is a growing body of scholarship acknowledging the gendered impact of campaign finance, and documenting the emerging efforts to mitigate this impact, there is still much that we do not know. In particular, there are two areas in which knowledge is limited, and on which this special issue focuses. The first is the impact of campaign costs on individual candidates. Most studies focus on fundraising efforts to meet formal election costs, and the majority of this scholarship is centered on the US, where campaigns are very personalized, candidates run in single-member districts, and parties have limited influence. We develop this literature by looking at cases outside the US context, exploring how different institutional variables (such as electoral and party systems) shape gender gaps in fundraising. In addition, we consider how the cost of running for office also falls onto individual candidates through the personal investment required to run for office. Second, we still know little about the role of political parties in addressing and mitigating gender gaps in political finance. Many initiatives by parties are relatively recent and remain understudied by scholars of campaign finance, gender and politics, and political parties alike. We provide new theoretical and empirical contributions to strengthen this area of research.

Deepening our understanding of gendered political finance

In this section we introduce the articles in this special issue, demonstrating how they extend our existing knowledge and offer important new perspectives in this emerging area. We examine seven case studies across six articles, covering a variety of democracies from different parts of the world. While all six articles explore related themes and are mutually complementary, three (Murray, forthcoming; Atmor and Kenig, forthcoming; Feo et al., forthcoming) make a particular contribution to our understanding of individual candidates, while three (Buckley and Mariani, forthcoming; Muriaas et al., forthcoming b; Shin and Kwon, forthcoming) enhance our knowledge of the roles of political parties in mitigating financial gender gaps.

We begin by exploring the role of money in candidate emergence. While many studies of campaign finance look at fundraising, the personal costs faced by candidates are relatively understudied. Murray’s article on the UK hones in on this issue, demonstrating how the large investment of time and resource expected of parliamentary candidates can exclude those without significant wealth. This ‘class ceiling’ intersects with the glass ceiling caused by gender inequality, discrimination, abuse and gendered family roles. The cumulative impact of the class and glass ceilings creates particular barriers for working-class women. Murray illustrates the role of formal institutions (such as the length of the election campaign, brought to the fore by recent ‘snap’ elections), alongside informal institutions and rules (such as the stigma of asking for help). The article concludes that barriers to running for office should be considered cumulatively and intersectionally, with personal costs playing an important role within the broader puzzle of inequality in political representation.

While the UK, like the US, features single-member districts with a high emphasis on individual candidates, our second article casts light on campaign finance within a very different context. In Israel, the entire country forms a single multi-member district, resulting in distinctive electoral challenges. Atmor and Kenig explore gender gaps in fundraising during party primaries, which is where campaign differences between individual candidates are most notable. The authors find that men spend more overall than women. However, this effect is not driven directly by gender, but rather by the gendered nature of incumbency; incumbents raise more funds than challengers, and the majority of incumbents are men while the majority of women are challengers. Women also face a hostile political environment due to conservative social attitudes and a militarized policy agenda. Quotas have helped somewhat to mitigate these barriers; without them, gender gaps would be more stark. This article demonstrates the importance of contextualizing findings of gender gaps to identify the underlying causal explanations.

Incumbency is also a key variable in our third article, where Feo et al. demonstrate how incumbency drives fundraising gaps in Italy. Electoral reform within Italy has produced a shift from state to private financing of elections, with candidates increasingly depending on fundraising from private donors. Gender gaps in fundraising networks have meant that Italian women have faced greater challenges in raising funds, especially for women on the left who have less access to wealthy donors. For these women, the diminishing role of party funds has left them without a fallback, placing them at a relative disadvantage. Feo et al. demonstrate clearly how changes to formal institutions can produce gendered effects that thwart women’s access to politics.

Our fourth article, by Buckley and Mariani, looks at Ireland, another country where party funds are a key resource for supporting women and mitigating gender gaps in fundraising. Ireland has recently introduced gender quota reforms that have incentivized political parties to field more women candidates. The quotas are helping to mitigate the lower presence of women in springboard positions within local politics, but one consequence is that the women now running for national office tend to have less experience than their male counterparts and have found it more challenging to raise the necessary funds. Buckley and Mariani find that, unlike other countries where parties have resisted giving financial support to women (Ohman, 2018; Wylie and Dos Santos, 2016), parties in Ireland have given strategic financial support to newcomer women to help make them more competitive in elections. Ireland is therefore a positive example of parties targeting financial support at women to boost their electoral prospects.

The questions of whether, when and how parties might support women candidates financially remain under-explored within the literature. In our fifth article, Muriaas et al. make an important theoretical contribution to developing our understanding of the role of parties within different gendered political financing regimes. The authors study party responses to gender funding gaps in two countries (Cabo Verde and Ghana) with very different institutional features. They find that where the costs of running for office are high (in candidate-centered systems with single-member districts and no public financing), the barriers that women face are more salient to parties than when the costs of running are low (in party-centered proportional systems with multi-member districts and public funding). This is reflected in their finding that parties offered targeted financial support to women in Ghana but not in Cabo Verde. A holistic approach to understand how parties address gender gaps in political financing is needed, however, because barriers caused by money are complex and occur at different stages of the recruitment process.

While targeted financial support for women is always welcome in principle, it is not always effective in practice. In our final article, the South Korean case study presents a curious puzzle: gender quotas, alongside gender-targeted public finance, have been in place for nearly two decades, yet increases in women’s representation in parliament have been very modest and remain below the world average. Shin and Kwon demonstrate that the gender-targeted public finance, whereby parties are given hypothecated funds by the state to spend on initiatives to support women’s access to politics, are misappropriated by parties and spent on activities which do not benefit women. The impact of financial incentives to implement gender quotas is also too narrow, excluding small parties that are more likely to field women candidates, and providing insufficient incentives to large parties to comply with the quota. The South Korean case is an important illustration of the potential limitations of gendered financing initiatives as an instrument to promote women’s access to politics, and the need for these initiatives to be implemented in a way that fulfills their stated purpose.

Collectively, these articles offer many new and important insights into the way that gendered political finance shapes women’s access to politics, both through gender gaps in access to funds and through initiatives intended to support women’s entry into politics. The remainder of this introductory article explores in more detail some of the core themes and insights that emerge collectively from across the different articles.

How formal institutions mediate and shape the cost of running for office

While elections are costly in all democracies, the extent of the cost (overall, and for individual candidates) varies significantly depending on several institutional variables. Here we outline the key institutions that affect the cost of running for office, demonstrating both how these institutions impact election costs generally, and how their effects might be gendered.

Electoral systems are well known to have a huge impact on the nature of elections. Proportional representation (PR) systems typically place a greater emphasis on party tickets, while single member plurality (SMP) systems are more candidate focused. In single member districts such as the UK, the selection process is often very competitive, many costs are individualized and candidates who bring resources to the party may be at an advantage. When district magnitude is greater, the emphasis on individual candidates reduces and more of the costs of running are transferred onto the party, although candidates will still have to vie for an electable position on the party list.

A wide literature has demonstrated that, overall, PR systems are more favorable to women, as they reduce the emphasis on incumbents, promote the balancing of party tickets and work better in tandem with gender quotas (Matland and Studlar, 1996; Rule and Zimmerman, 1994; Tremblay, 2012). Proportional systems with large district magnitude and closed party lists are typically the most accessible to women. Muriaas et al. (2020) advance the hypothesis that the higher monetary cost of running under SMP creates an additional gendered effect of electoral systems, leading us to expect that women will fare better under PR systems. This is borne out in our case studies. The electoral system is a key variable explaining why more women are elected in Cabo Verde (PR) than in Ghana (SMP). Women also fare badly under SMP in the UK, while in Italy the recent switch from PR to SMP had a negative impact on women’s representation, while making elections significantly more expensive to contest. South Korea has a mixed member system, and here the difference is particularly stark. Women have made greater progress under the PR element, while very few women are elected in single member districts. It is important to note, however, that not all proportional systems are equally beneficial. Ireland uses a Single Transferable Vote system, notionally categorized as a form of PR, which places a heavy emphasis on individual candidates and therefore shares some of the problems of SMP.

Whatever the electoral system, the cost of selection may exceed the cost of election, as the latter is typically borne at least in part by the party and/or state, while the former is borne by the individual candidate. Selection costs may be particularly elevated when selection takes place through a primary (understood here to mean an open selection contest with a wide selectorate). Primaries have grown in popularity in recent years, with several perceived benefits for democracy. First, they take selection decisions away from a narrow elite, enabling a more inclusive and participatory selection process. Second, they ensure that candidates appeal to a broad rather than narrow audience. Third, they are seen as a measure protecting against corruption, on the grounds that it is much harder to buy votes when the selectorate comprises thousands of people rather than a small handful. Nevertheless, primaries are not as inclusive as they might at first appear. The need to reach a large and diffuse audience can increase the time and cost of a selection campaign quite dramatically, making selection a much bigger hurdle to overcome for candidates with limited resources. In both Ghana and Israel, where primaries have recently been introduced, our authors found that primaries increased selection costs and made elections less accessible to women.

One obvious institutional solution to the high cost of elections would be to curtail costs by imposing spending limits. Such a measure prevents costs from spiraling out of most people’s reach. Both Cabo Verde and Israel have introduced spending limits to positive effect. While there are clear benefits of capping costs and making elections more affordable, there is a gendered caveat. Women often need to spend more than men to compensate for other forms of disadvantage, such as lower visibility and reduced access to media coverage. If expenses are capped then women cannot outspend men, and therefore cannot mitigate these other forms of disadvantage. This is an example of why electoral finance and gender need to be considered in tandem; measures such as spending limits can only be positive for women if they are accompanied by additional measures to address other forms of gender disadvantage.

Another institutional means of financial restraint is capping the size of individual donations. Doing so would ensure that no candidate is too indebted to any particular funding source, thus limiting the risk of corruption and an expectation of a ‘quid pro quo’ in exchange for donations. The case of Italy demonstrates that men are more likely to rely on fewer but larger donations, including sizeable corporate donations, while women have to work harder for lots of small donations. This is therefore a measure that would serve both to reduce the role of money in politics and to place men and women on a more even footing, as men would now be required to seek smaller donations from a larger number of sources.

The role of private money in politics could be diminished even further if the state assumes responsibility for funding political parties and elections. Some countries are hostile to the notion, while others embrace the public funding of democracy (Norris and Abel van Es, 2016; Van Biezen and Kopecký, 2007). State funding can be beneficial, as it reduces the need for private sources of income and reliance on fundraising (both of which can place women at a disadvantage). It also increases transparency about income sources and reduces corruption. It should be noted that state funding, while helpful, is not an automatic panacea. Ireland provides state funding for parties, but not for election costs, leaving parties with a large hole to fill. State funding in South Korea is heavily skewed towards the two largest parties, leaving candidates in the smaller parties struggling to cover basic costs such as filing fees. Meanwhile, Italy recently retracted state funding for political parties, which led to an immediate regression towards the capture of politics by wealthy individuals and corporations (at the expense of women).

Alongside formal political institutions, we might anticipate a partisan divide on the twin issues of electoral financing and women’s representation (Crowder-Meyer and Cooperman, 2018). Parties of the left have traditionally held a better track record than their right-wing counterparts for getting women into office (Caul, 1999). However, the traditional left–right divide does not translate well to non-western democracies, which comprised nearly half of our cases. It is perhaps unsurprising that ideology did not emerge as a strong explanatory variable across all our studies. There was some evidence that left-wing parties had made greater strides with gender quotas in Israel and the UK, and there was also evidence that parties on the right expected their candidates to possess, or have greater access to, wealth in Italy and the UK. Left-wing parties also gave more financial support to female candidates in Italy. We propose that this issue is ripe for further exploration and more systematic analysis to determine whether these findings are generalizable.

It is also worth noting that our study did not reveal a clear distinction between old and new democracies. Funding is a universal barrier that transgresses the age of the democracy, and attempts at reform were introduced in both types of democracy (although with varied effect; Ireland and Cabo Verde introduced progressive reforms, while Italy introduced reforms that could be considered regressive). New democracies are, perhaps, more wary of corruption. Old democracies are more settled and robust, but this may also make it more difficult to introduce reforms, as evidenced by the UK.

Informal institutions of gender and their financial repercussions

Patriarchal constructions of gender create a huge variety of informal norms and institutions. These informal rules create an uneven playing field which can lead to unequal results even when the formal rules appear gender-neutral. Within the specific context of electoral finance, we noted three particular areas in which these informal institutions placed additional constraints on women that had financial repercussions. It should be noted that there is a vast literature on the many ways in which gender roles and stereotypes thwart women’s access to elected office; while our discussion here cannot be exhaustive, we must recognize that the specific constraints that we identify operate in tandem with a wide variety of other barriers that women face.

As noted in the UK case study, one of the key resources required to contest an election is time, and time is both gendered and financially significant. Time invested in politics is rarely remunerated prior to election, and therefore comes at the expense of time invested in paid employment, making campaigns less accessible to those without independent wealth or substantial savings. Women are less likely to have these resources to draw upon, and also provide a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic labor. Housework and childrearing, when combined with paid employment, represent the ‘double burden’ that women carry, and when political activity enters the mix it becomes an impossible ‘triple burden’. Outsourcing domestic work entails a financial cost that poorer women cannot bear. This simple barrier explains why fewer women are able to run for office than men, and why those who do tend to come from wealthier backgrounds.

Second, patriarchal attitudes were present in various forms across all our case studies, and manifested in a questioning of women’s competence, viability and place in public life. These attitudes made it harder for women to get their message across, and also stymied their fundraising efforts.

Third, we identified a reluctance by donors to give financial support to female newcomers. While incumbents of both sexes were able to attract donations at similar rates, female newcomers were seen as a risky bet given their status both as challengers and as outsiders (within male-dominated political arenas). In order for politics to feminize, some male incumbents need to be replaced with female challengers, but concerns about these women’s viability made it harder for them to raise funds. This phenomenon emerged in Israel, Italy and Ireland, and has also been noted in Chile (Piscopo et al., 2021).

Targeted measures to support women

Given the many additional barriers, both financial and political, that women face, a raft of measures have been considered to promote women’s access to politics. The most widespread of these is gender quotas, which are now used widely worldwide. Quotas vary significantly in their effectiveness, and there are many reasons for this (Krook, 2009). Among our cases, quotas have had the most beneficial impact in Israel, where they have helped push women into winnable positions on party lists, thus compensating for the challenges women otherwise face in accessing those positions. In Ireland, gender quotas with a public funding penalty have forced parties to invest greater resources in women candidates. In a country where politics has long been very male-dominated, most women candidates are newcomers, and quotas have prompted parties to invest greater financial resources in these women to compensate for their outsider status. This is a good example of how quotas have been a catalyst for investment in women, and how money has been used as a way to compensate for other forms of disadvantage.

Money has been less successful as a lever for enforcing quota implementation in South Korea, as the funds to help develop women candidates in various ways have been oriented primarily towards campaign costs. Targeted financial support can also be used as an alternative to quotas, as seen in Ghana, where filing fees were reduced for women. Such measures, while helpful, are typically too small to overcome the many other hurdles that women face. However, they do provide a signaling effect, acknowledging that women face additional barriers and making some attempt to address them. Targeted financial support should best be considered as a complementary approach that works alongside other measures to make them more effective.

Conclusion

This special issue identifies the ways in which the cost of running for office is gendered, with women typically starting with fewer resources and then facing additional hurdles along the way. Women are less well placed than men to bear the personal costs of time and money required to run for office. Women face gendered barriers to fundraising, including needing to work harder to raise money due to their exclusion from affluent networks and their reliance on smaller donations. Women are also disadvantaged by their status as newcomers; male incumbents are better placed to win their elections, while female challengers find it harder to raise funds and gain a foothold. Parties play an important role in mitigating some of these problems. For example, parties in Ireland and left-wing parties in Italy have given financial support to women candidates to compensate for lower levels of fundraising. Parties in Ghana have reduced the cost of running for women candidates, while parties in South Korea have created – although largely squandered – opportunities to fund measures to boost women’s access to politics.

Collectively, the articles in this special issue demonstrate the need to pay greater attention to gender in studies of campaign finance, and to give greater consideration to the role of political parties in addressing gender gaps in funding. They also highlight the importance of formal and informal institutions in shaping gendered political finance. They illustrate the various ways in which money matters, how this is gendered and how some of these challenges might be addressed.