Professor Discusses Female Presidential Victories

On Tuesday, Sept. 8, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University in Chile Catherine Reyes-Housholder delivered a talk on her new book titled “How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America.” Reyes-Housholder is an alumna of Smith College, and her scholarship regarding gender and presidential politics has been recognized within many academic journals. The event was sponsored by the Amherst College Political Science Department and took place in Pruyne Lecture Hall.

The talk covered the main arguments of her book, making the claim that women’s success in Latin American presidential elections revolves around the first stage of the process, such as nomination, as gendered incentives and perceived potential of candidates help decide if a woman is nominated by her political party. 

Dwight W. Morrow 1985 Professor of Political Science Javier Corrales introduced the talk, expressing that “it is very difficult to get women elected and very few presidential elections produce women’s victories,” but in Latin America, there is a larger number than in other regions. He hoped the talk could “help [the audience] understand that phenomenon, both the scarcity of women in presidential politics, but also the bigger success of women candidates in Latin America.”

Reyes-Housholder began the talk by outlining the main motivation for her research as she acknowledged that “the most difficult kind of political power for women to obtain, arguably, is the most important: the power of the presidency.” She came into her research with the understanding that why and when political parties decide to nominate a woman for president remains the “great mystery,” but has left her research seeing the first stage of the election process — the party nomination stage — as the key to understanding women’s political victories. 

Reyes-Housholder showcased that women have “only won 6% of these contests worldwide between 1990 and 2020,” arguing that “one of the greatest political disparities in the world is gender inequalities in presidential politics.” This disparity made her then question “how do women win presidential elections?” 

The first answer she considered was that women win presidential victories by leveraging their family connections, especially their “family ties to men in politics.” She argued that there were many problems with this answer, that this idea “tends to exaggerate the role of male family members in securing these women’s victories,” and “fails to recognize the role of women’s political skills and …  acumen.” This argument also “seems to matter less and less over time for women’s access to national leadership positions, including the presidency,” and women in Latin America with no family ties have won the presidency as well.

For a more accurate explanation of how women win presidential elections in Latin America, Reyes-Housholder stated that the most important theory about presidential elections is “accountability theory.” This theory holds that elections tend to function as a referendum on those in power, such that if the public is satisfied with the incumbent’s performance, they will reward the incumbent and keep them in power with their votes but if the public is dissatisfied, they will vote for an opposition party. Reyes-Housholder then explained limitations to this theory: For example, it does not work well when the public has “many similarly sized opposition parties from which to choose in order to express their disapproval with the incumbent,” as well as the theory being “gender blind,” leading it to being unable to tell us how women rather than men win presidential elections. This led to Reyes-Housholder’s sentiment that “we need a new theory to explain” this phenomenon. 

Reyes-Housholder then argued for a new theory to consider presidential elections, stating that there are “three paths to victory for women”: through “major opposition parties or coalitions,” through “a party or coalition that’s already in power,” or through “re-election.” She also noted that men, on the other hand, “have enjoyed and continue to enjoy much more diverse pathways to victory.”

Another key component of Reyes-Housholder’s theory is the “nomination process,” where women are often nominated by their party due to “gendered incentives of political parties.” These incentives include “ideas about motherhood and maternalism” that associate women in presidential politics with the qualities of novelty and moral integrity, as well as notions of in addition to “feminine leadership and empathetic leadership.” These qualities support a candidate’s “perceived potential” for the party’s success. Reyes-Housholder suggested that understanding party nominations and why parties would choose to nominate a woman or a man is one of the most important steps to understand why women win the presidency.  

Through statistical modeling, Reyes-Housholder showcased that when the number of people who identify with political parties or when the level of trust in political parties goes down, the probability of nominating a woman instead of a man actually goes up. She then noted the same trend when corruption increases. 

Following the talk, there was a Q&A session where Reyes-Housholder also argued for the importance of “gender quotas,” in politics, as “17 out of 18 Latin American countries now have gender quotas” for a certain number of women nominated for legislative positions. These quotas “increase the number of women who have national and political experience,” and there is a need to “imagine how we could apply gender quotas to presidential politics.”

Reyes-Housholder also emphasized that as an intellectual, she does not know if gender stereotypes are “good or bad,” but conceptualizes them as “tools,” which “in some cases can open doors for women.”

Hannah Messaye ’27 thought the talk was “impressive,” as it dove deeper into topics she had studied in previous courses such as “Markets and Democracy in Latin America,” where they “brushed over somethings or did not go super in depth into certain topics.”