The most difficult kind of political power for women to obtain arguably is the most important: the presidency. This book develops a theory of how women win presidential elections. I argue that party nominations constitute the central black box of women’s victories. The concepts of gendered incentives and perceived potential explain when and why parties decide to back specific women for president. Citizens’ satisfaction with incumbent performance, in turn, helps account for the victories or losses of women nominated by major parties. This book illustrates the theory through an examination of Latin America, the world region with the greatest concentration of presidential democracies.
Overview Across the globe, some of the most powerful chief executive offices—such as the “pure presidential” regime of the United States—are precisely the ones women are least likely to hold (Jalalzai 2013). The most common and legitimate way to access the presidency is through democratic elections, and yet, women have won just 6% of these races worldwide from 1990 to 2020. Their victory rates during this period remain similarly low across regions, varying from 9% in Asia to just 3% in Africa. How do women win presidential elections?
I answer this question by turning to Latin America, a region characterized by powerful presidents, democratic elections, and similarly low (7%) rates of women’s victories as the rest of the world. This book, in turn, develops a two-stage theory of how women win the presidency. While conventional accounts focus on family ties or voters’ sexism, I maintain that party nominations constitute the central black box of women’s victories.
This book theorizes and illustrates two concepts that motivate parties to back women for president: gendered incentives and perceived potential. I argue that selectors, the members of a party or coalition who choose presidential candidates or influence nominations, often have multiple goals: they want to maximize vote share to win the election, and they may seek to improve their party’s brand. Outgoing presidents who act as selectors also want to back candidates who can secure their legacies. Rightly or wrongly, electors tend to assume that picking a presidential candidate with the right set of traits can help them achieve their goals. They therefore face incentives to nominate someone with these coveted attributes. Selectors evaluate possible nominees based on their capacity to transmit these desired traits—what I call perceived potential. Selectors use systematic or anecdotal evidence to compare candidates’ future performance and often end up choosing the person they think offers the best available combination of sought-after attributes.
Gender enters this theoretical equation insofar as some of the traits that selectors look for and use to assess possible nominees are associated with women in presidential politics. Novelty and moral integrity emerge as two of the most important traits associated with women in presidential politics. Women’s historical exclusion from arenas of power means that women can be viewed as symbols of change (Murray 2010; Jalalzai 2013; Schwindt-Bayer and Reyes-Housholder 2017; Baldez 2002). Women in presidential politics may be especially associated with novelty given women’s extreme marginalization in this arena of power (O’Brien and Reyes-Housholder 2020; Beckwith 2020). Due to women’s outsider status and ideas regarding maternalism, citizens in diverse countries may associate women in presidential politics with moral integrity (Reyes-Housholder 2024). The book further explains how women in presidential politics can be viewed as modern, empathetic, or “feminine” leaders.
The idea that women in presidential politics may be associated with desirable traits helps unlock the mysteries behind women’s nominations and, by extension, women’s victories. Selectors sometimes calculate that to achieve their goals, their next candidate needs to convey attributes linked to women in presidential politics, such as novelty and moral integrity. When this occurs, parties’ incentives are gendered feminine. However, these alignments between selectors’ goals and traits associated with women in presidential politics do not by themselves ensure women’s presidential nominations. Selectors’ assessments of possible nominees’ capacities to convey these coveted qualities—their perceived potential—also matters. Confronted with incentives that are gendered feminine, selectors will opt to back a woman only if they view her as better than other possible contenders at transmitting these traits.
The key to understanding women’s presidential victories lies in their nominations, specifically by incumbent or major challenger parties. Once the nominations are fixed, presidential elections for women tend to function as a referendum on those holding power (Carlin, Singer, and Zechmeister 2015; Lewis-Beck and Ratto 2013; Valdini and Lewis‐Beck 2018). Yet citizens’ satisfaction with the incumbent cannot account for all the complexity that drives election results. I instead suggest that because women tend to win the presidency via incumbent or major challenger parties, citizens’ evaluations of incumbents tend to predict women’s presidential victories in Latin America comparatively well. When voters think that the current administration is doing a good job, women backed by parties in power remain well-positioned to win the presidency, whereas women from major challenger parties tend to lose in similar conditions. Conversely, when voters think that the current administration is doing a bad job, women nominated by incumbent parties tend to lose whereas women nominated by major challenger parties tend to win.
This book develops and tests the theory of women’s presidential victories with qualitative case studies supplemented by statistics at the country and regional levels. Case studies remain a trusted social scientific tool to achieve conceptual validity and explore causal mechanisms, and thereby serve the book’s theory-building objectives (George and Bennett 2005, 19–22). I examine the nominations and victories of Michelle Bachelet in Chile in 2005–2006 and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in 2010, as well as the nomination and subsequent defeat of Blanca Ovelar in Paraguay in 2007–2008. The case studies illustrate gendered incentives and perceived potential by chronologically tracing which individuals or groups acted as selectors, which traits they sought in their next presidential candidate, and how selectors assessed these women’s ability to convey desirable attributes vis-à-vis other possible nominees. This book goes beyond theory development to test the gendered incentives argument with statistical models featuring data on all presidential candidacies in seventeen Latin American countries.
Media archives and national surveys served as two pillars of evidence. Newspapers offer treasure troves of data concerning selectors’ views of how to achieve their goals and assessments of who to nominate. I contextualize my interpretation of these data rather than quantifying them. I also draw heavily from the same national surveys that party selectors studied to determine which traits selectors sought (gendered incentives). Some surveys helped reveal which potential nominees were performing well on those traits (perceived potential). The case studies also analyze campaign discourse. I assume that parties strategically craft campaign rhetoric and advertisements to highlight what they believe to be candidates’ strengths. Such discourse can thereby speak to how selectors view a nominee’s trait-based advantages. I therefore analyze media records of what was said and done on the campaign trail and in televised advertisements for possible evidence of perceived potential.
The case studies of Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay uncovered how selectors came to understand how the traits of novelty, moral integrity, modernity, and/or feminine leadership could help them achieve their goals. These chapters identify Concertación elites in Chile, outgoing President Lula in Brazil, and both President Duarte and other Asociación Nacional Republicana (ANR) leaders in Paraguay as the de facto selectors. The chapters show that in the years and months prior to the presidential nomination, these groups and individuals thought they needed to nominate a novel, honest, modern, and/or compassionate candidate to win the election, build the party’s brand, or enhance the outgoing president’s legacy.
The case studies uncovered selectors’ evaluations of how well Bachelet, Ovelar, and Rousseff could transmit novelty, moral integrity, modernity, and feminine leadership. Concertación elites, President Lula, and ANR leaders all used national surveys to assess voters’ views of possible nominees’ attributes. Concertación selectors believed that Bachelet conveyed desired attributes better than a similarly positioned ministra, Soledad Alvear, particularly in terms of “feminine” or compassionate leadership. ANR and Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) selectors likewise viewed Ovelar and Rousseff as potential symbols of cultural modernity and progress, which helped to positively differentiate them from their men counterparts. Although selectors never reached perfect agreement about who to nominate, in each of these cases they tended to view Bachelet, Rousseff, and Ovelar as the best options to embody the traits they needed to achieve their electoral, party-building, and legacy objectives.
These women’s divergent fates—that, is victories for Bachelet and Rousseff and a loss for Ovelar—are chiefly due to variations in citizens’ satisfaction with the parties holding presidential power at the time. Each of these chapters uses nationally representative survey data to statistically model prospective vote choice. Results show that measures of citizens’ satisfaction with the incumbent party consistently predicted prospective vote choice for each of these women. In short, Bachelet and Rousseff won in large part thanks to Chileans’ and Brazilians’ desire to continue with Concertación and PT leadership while Paraguayans’ desire for democratic change limited Ovelar’s prospects in the general election.
The final empirical chapter tests the two-stage theory with an original data set of all presidential candidacies in eighteen countries in post-transition Latin America. A series of statistical models tests the role of parties’ gendered incentives via survey proxies from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) data from 2004 to 2019. These proxies for parties’ incentives to signal novelty and moral integrity significantly correlate with selectors’ likelihood of nominating women for president in ways the theory anticipates. Moreover, a key indicator of citizens’ satisfaction with incumbent performance—presidential approval ratings—reasonably tracks whether women nominees of incumbent parties win or lose. A shadow case study of the 2021 presidential election in Honduras depicts how Xiomara Castro de Zelaya helped build and then leveraged a major challenger party to win a race in a context of citizen discontent. In theorizing the mechanics underlying women’s presidential victories, this book contributes to research on gender, elections, and the presidency. The concept of parties’ gendered incentives implies that candidate attributes, which conventionally are viewed as barriers to women’s access to power, can in some instances open doors for women with presidential ambitions. The theory has broad implications for scholarship on the Latin American presidency, namely the importance of presidential nominations, the nuanced role of candidates’ attributes, and the relevance of men’s gender.