When Do Family Ties Matter? The Duration of Female Suffrage and Women’s Path to High Political Office

• Author: Julia Gray,Alexander Baturo
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912918759438
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918759438

Political Research Quarterly

2018, Vol. 71(3) 695 –709

© 2018 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912918759438

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Article

What factors determine whether women are ultimately

successful in holding the highest office in their country?

Given the scarcity of female heads of state, one might

assume that women tend to have fundamentally different

levels of political experience or background traits than

men do. However, because female leaders are such a rare

occurrence, it is difficult to make inferences about the

background characteristics that distinguish female lead-

ers from males in terms of their qualifications for their

country’s highest office.

We argue that two different but related factors come into

play when considering women’s advancement to head of

state. First, although women and men have similar paths to

leadership in terms of their levels of education and career

trajectories, female leaders require significant resources,

connections, and networks to achieve political leadership—

more so than their male counterparts (Folke, Rickne, and

Smith 2017; Jalalzai 2013). Those resources most fre-

quently take the form of being part of political dynasties,

particularly when women are not present in politics more

broadly. However, family dynasties are less important the

longer that women have been active in political life more

generally. We argue that once female suffrage has been

institutionalized—that is, if voting rights have been in place

to an extent that female participation in politics is regarded

by citizens as commonplace—the importance of family ties

will decrease. That is, women leaders benefit from family

ties when women are scarce in political life generally, but as

their participation in politics becomes normalized, family

ties become less important.

We test our argument using a novel dataset that allows

us to compare the individual backgrounds of all male and

female leaders in the world from 1960 to 2010. Previous

studies have only been able to compare female leaders

with a limited selection of male leaders. Drawn from

extensive firsthand research on the biographies of leaders

around the globe, these original data allow us to broaden

the scope of previous studies, by comparing the accom-

plishments and background of female leaders with their

male counterparts around the globe, over five decades.

This paper makes a number of contributions. First, in

contrast to studies that compare female and male leaders

on a limited basis (such as comparing all female leaders

with their immediate male predecessors in the same

office, or in small-sized or contemporaneous samples),

759438PRQXXX10.1177/1065912918759438Political Research QuarterlyGray and Baturo

research-article2018

1Dublin City University, Ireland

2University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

Corresponding Author:

Julia Gray, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania,

208 S. 37th Street, Room 217, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215, USA.

Email: jcgray@sas.upenn.edu

When Do Family Ties Matter? The

Duration of Female Suffrage and

Women’s Path to High Political Office

Alexander Baturo1 and Julia Gray2

Abstract

While the percentage of female heads of state in the world has increased to around 10 percent in the 2010s, a female

president or prime minister still remains an exception. Recent scholarship has proposed a number of explanations

behind this phenomenon, but there exist important gaps. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we use

new and comprehensive data to undertake a systematic examination of the differences in the personal, education,

and career backgrounds between female and male effective political leaders from 1960 to 2010. We find that female

leaders are as qualified as men. Second, because the phenomenon of female leadership is still a rare occurrence, we

argue that this fact must be accounted for in empirical modeling. Third, we show that many female leaders tend to

acquire the necessary resources, support, and name recognition through political dynasties. To that end, women

leaders need to rely on family ties more than men do. However, the importance of such connections attenuates when

female suffrage has been in place for longer, and citizens are more open to women in politics.

Keywords

gender and politics, political leaders, selection into office, representation