Candidate Gender and Electoral Success in Single Transferable Vote Systems

The proportion of those elected to national legislatures who are women varies widely, with most countries falling far short of gender parity. In the average parliament, only 18 per cent of the members are women, but some countries have nearly obtained gender parity while others have no women at all in office.1 Most of the comparative, cross-national work on women’s representation tries to explain differences in the percentage of seats held by women using aggregate-level factors, such as socio-economic development, political culture or electoral institutions.2 While this answers an important question about women’s descriptive representation, its dominance has nearly precluded research on other equally essential and related questions.