Twice as Hard, Half as Good? Women Candidates on the Campaign Trail
What are women’s pathways to political office? And what are the barriers they face along the way that can explain the continued lack of women’s representation in elected office? How can we explain that women, when they stand for office, are about as likely to win as men? To answer these questions, we reconsider the “gender penalty” faced by women candidates to take into account their everyday experiences on the campaign trail. We ask whether women are working “twice as hard” to achieve similar levels of electoral success. To answer this question, we investigate the ways in which women candidates anticipate and counter everyday experiences by working “twice as hard” or being “twice as good”.
To better understand how these everyday encounters on the campaign trail, both online and offline and in the media, shape women’s campaign efforts and chances at electoral success, we have an ambitious five-year programme of research that captures candidate experiences and assesses their impact on electoral outcomes. We employ a mixed-methods approach, bringing together participant-observation of candidates on the campaign trail in four countries with quantitative media analysis, candidate surveys and a battery of items administered in Round 11 of the European Social Survey to create a cross-national gender attitudes index. This rich data will generate new insights into the causes of women’s continued under-representation in politics.
Van Zijl J. Examining Women’s Experiences on the Campaign Trail: Campaign Ethnographies in the 2023 Dutch Provincial Elections - Summary Report Examining Women’s Experiences on the Campaign Trail: Campaign Ethnographies in the 2023 Dutch Provincial Elections - A Pilot Study for TWICEASGOOD. 26 Jul 2023 (Report)
Collaborative ethnography: culture and politics in parliaments in the UK and the US
Date: 14th July 2023
Time: 13:00- 16:00
Place: University of Exeter, Knightley, Knightley Boardroom
Speaker: Emma Crewe, SOAS University of London
Emma Crewe, a political anthropologist based at SOAS University of London, has been researching the Westminster Parliament for 25 years. Her focus has been on the political work of elected politicians and those they work with, including their rhythms of performance; riffs of meaning; and rituals and symbols. She is also interested in the process of inquiry itself. She has been exploring processes of collaboration and conflict within ethnographic research as a political process. Offering narratives from three sites of fieldwork and domains of political work – constituency surgeries in West Dundee, Scotland; inquiries undertaken by select committees in Westminster; and making law in the Texas legislature – she will reflect on both partiality and ethics. When navigating partiality and aspiring towards ethics in ethnographic research, possibilities will be enhanced by multi-disciplinarity, a radical commitment to plurality and reflexivity. But what else is required?
Between Westminster and Brussels: Putting the “Parliament” in Parliamentary Ethnography
Date: 12th June 2023
Time: 15:00- 17:00
Place: University of Exeter, Digital Humanities, Seminar 1
Speaker: Dr Cherry Miller, University of Glasgow
Gender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic method[1]ology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible
Misogyny In The Modern World: From Politics to Violent Extremism
Date: 19th October 2022
Time: 11:30- 16:00
Place: University of Exeter, Queens Building, Queens LT7.2 Room
Anti-woman and anti-feminist attitudes pervade throughout society, from everyday micro-behaviours to macro-level, societal, issues. This free special workshop will bring together a number of notable researchers who have looked at these issues in a number of disparate areas, including in electoral behaviour, political representation, gender-based violence, and violent extremism. The aim of the workshop will be to present state-of-the-art research in the areas below and to encourage discussion between participants and attendees in order to develop research ideas and potential collaborations.
Workshop schedule:
1130: Welcome and introduction.
1200: Susan Banducci and Liz Ablett: Campaign Ethnographies: Examining Women’s Experiences on the Campaign Trail.
1230: Kaitlin Senk: Measuring Sexism in Cross-national Surveys.
1300: Sofia Collignon from Queen Mary University of London: Measuring and addressing gendered political violence in the UK.
1330: Lisa Sugiura from University of Portsmouth: Reflections on Researcher Safety and Wellbeing when Studying Online Misogynistic Groups.
1400: Debbie Ging: The Manopshere.
1430: Lewys Brace: Incels and online extremism.
1500: Simone Long: Incels and the far-right.
1530: Closing statements and social.