Recruitment of Female Candidates by Political Parties

Analysis of the Nation-wide Local Election in 2019

Abstract

The 2019 Unified Local Election is the first nationwide election after a new act for gender equality in politics was enforced in 2018, which calls for political parties and groups to strive for achieving equality “as much as possible” in terms of the number of male and female candidates in both national and local elections. This paper aims to examine how the participation of women in local assemblies was promoted and how political parties recruited women by analyzing the data of local assembly-member elections aggregated by sex, local government levels and parties. There is a slight increase of the percentages of female candidates and women elected in 2019 though it recorded the highest ever at every local government level. Why has the participation of women made steady, but small progress in local assemblies? By analyzing the data of prefectural assembly-membership elections in the 2015 and 2019 Unified Local Elections, where most of the candidates belong to political parties and fewer women are elected than at municipal assembly-membership elections, this paper found the following. First, there are increasing number and successful rate of female newcomer candidates while the number of newcomer male candidates are on the decrease. Second, women elected who get the most votes at their election districts increased in number in the 2019 election. Third, because all political parties did not recruit more newcomer female candidates, it led to a slight, not sharp, increase of women at the 2019 election.