In this Conversation with Authors, we spoke with Amanda Clayton and Pär Zetterberg, the authors of the APSR open access article “Gender and Party Discipline: Evidence from Africa’s Emerging Party Systems.”

APSR: Could you discuss the aims of your paper, and the genesis of it?

AC: In terms of the origin, I’m grateful to Bob Mattes and Shaheen Mozaffar who run the African Legislatures Project (ALP), which is where we got our data. We had worked together on a piece also related to women’s representation which came out in Comparative Political Studies also with one of Pär’s colleagues (Cecilia Josefsson), and this was actually going to be part of that piece. I saw this finding that women have more party discipline than men when looking at that data. But then it became an idea of its own. Really it comes from their generosity with the data, their willingness to let me publish on gender related to the data.

APSR: In the process of transitioning this from a separate research project to this paper, what did you find most difficult? Was there a thorny issue you were you tackling?

PZ: Because it came from another project, we had already run lots of analysis before, so from my perspective it was quite smooth. One of our biggest considerations was whether we should think about comparing women and men within countries and parties; or whether we should look more comparatively to see if these gender differences are similar or different across countries. We decided to stick with comparing women and men within the same country and the same party, because that was the most straightforward comparison. But I still find it interesting to also look at whether these differences are larger and smaller in some countries than in others. And I guess it’s because we’re comparativists.

AC: Similarly, as Pär alluded to, in earlier versions of the paper we had a section where we looked at the size of the gender gap in discipline across the 17 countries and tried to do some hypothesizing about why gaps were smaller, but nothing really showed up significant – in part because the N was so small, only 17 countries, so I think it was a too-many-variables, not-enough-cases problem.

But I will say this was one of the most straightforward questions we’ve worked on! Even when presenting it, our findings are very intuitive to measure and understand – women have higher levels of party discipline than men, it holds across countries, it’s relevant for predicting women’s prioritization of women’s rights, etc. One thing that did come from the R&R was the behavioral measure. We went and found speech data and tried to think about what might be a behavioral implication of our findings that we could measure and would go beyond self-reporting.

APSR: I think one of the things that’s so great about this piece is — its multi-method approach. You use interviews, self-reported survey data, speech data. How did you fit those together, and why did you pick the pieces you did?

AC: Part of the origin that I didn’t even talk about is that I spent many months in Namibia in grad school investigating gender differences in party discipline. It seemed like women were particularly constrained there. And since I first traveled to Namibia in 2012, they adopted a gender quota. Talking to women who were elected through the gender quota, they knew where their bread was buttered and would not depart from the party in any way. So, in some sense, the question of why I looked at gender or differences in party discipline was because I had observed it in Namibia. I had all this rich interview data from trips I had made over the years.

PZ: And what I realized during the process was that the quality of the data from Namibia was so rich and had some really great quotes as well. I think those great quotes really helped flesh out the narrative, so to speak.

APSR: In your paper, you are careful to say that these findings are fairly ambiguous for liberal democracy. Gender quotas might increase descriptive representation, but the women who tend to be elected through these quotas have higher levels of party discipline and privilege women’s rights legislation less. Can you think of any way out of this seeming trap?

AC: I mean, this is extrapolating from the data that we have, but in the other piece that I co-author that uses this data we find that women parliamentarians are more aligned with or report similar interests to women citizens, and that is strongest in democracies. We’re interested there in issues of substantive representation. You could say a similar sort of thing here: party cohesion is probably most important and valuable in more democratic regimes. So, Rwanda their parliament is 65% female, but it is an authoritarian regime – in that context, this representation is probably not wholly positive. I think countries that are more democratic and those with healthy multi-party competition can mean that party discipline behaves in a more normatively positive way for democratic development.

APSR: You mention in the paper that one of the mechanisms that might lead to higher levels of party discipline is that women have less access to classic patrimonialism or clientelism, which means they cannot behave as independently. Do you expect to find the same findings in regions where we expect there to be lower rates of clientelism and patrimonialism more broadly, and therefore where men and women are on more equal footing?

AC: When we were reviewing the past literature, one of the most prominent studies of this that shows a similar finding is in the UK in the British House of Commons, finding that women are more disciplined than men. That gave us some initial thought that maybe this isn’t a story purely of clientelism. There have been studies that make similar arguments around gender and clientelism in Pakistan and Argentina, so we think that this mechanism most likely would show up in places where that is part of politics, which is many places around the world. But that we also see it in the UK, and there is one study on US state legislatures that found something similar. And that’s part of our mechanism that’s more about feminist institutionalism and the expectations of women parliamentarians and that they’re expected to toe the party line, where men can be mavericks. Men can stand up against their parties and they don’t receive the same sort of pushback that women might, and I think that is universal.

APSR: One final question for our readers. Is there anything else you want your readers to know about your article that didn’t fit into the article or that you’re looking at as you move forward with this research?

PZ: I think we fit quite a lot into one paper! Something that I’ve been thinking about lately is under what circumstances do we then see men prioritizing gender equality issues – when does that occur? Amanda, myself, and a colleague of ours have a grant application that to some extent refers to that question. When we see that there is a crisis taking place, as with the pandemic, do we see that gender equality issues are being more prioritized in general – that is, also by men? Amanda and I have shown before how health issues are gendered – how they are prioritized by women. Will these issues be more prioritized by men after the pandemic? These things are interesting to see -when do we see men prioritize gender equality issues? Because it should be something that also is important to men not only to women.

– Amanda Clayton, Vanderbilt University

– Pär Zetterberg, Uppsala University