By Rohini Pande, Michael Callen, Binod Kumar Paudel, Satish Wasti
Sadhanadevi Nepal made history as Nepal’s first democratically-elected local representative in 1953, two years after the end of the Rana dynasty (Gorkhapatra, 9 September 1953, as cited in “Nepalko nirvachan itihas” by Election Commission, Nepal (2017, p. 157)). Since then, Nepali women have only seen very modest gains in Nepali politics. In 1992, only 1 in 200 elected representatives were women. Greater gains came in 1997 when women won 21% of local seats. In 2017, in Nepal’s first elections under the new federal constitution and largely due to the reservations, women’s representation rose to almost 41% of local (municipal and ward level) representatives.
The upcoming 2022 local elections provide a vital opportunity to build on these gains. Despite the remarkable gender inclusion achieved in the 2017 elections, female politicians are disproportionately in lower ranking positions than men. Nepal’s constitution mandates that a political party’s mayor and deputy mayor candidacies include at least one woman. In 2017, parties almost always fielded a male candidate for mayor and a female candidate for deputy mayor. As a result, only 18 of 753 municipalities have a female mayor. Women are also vastly underrepresented as ward chairpersons (where there are no quotas): only 62 of 6,473 ward chairpersons are female.
Women’s underrepresentation in leadership positions reflects a combination of the design of the quota system and party nomination behavior. Averaging across parties, only 6% of mayoral candidates were female and only 3.3% of candidates for ward chair were female in 2017.
Can this change in 2022? A large number of female politicians now have substantial experience as deputy mayors and ward committee members and are eager to stand for higher positions. In a March 2021 survey conducted by our research team, 46.6% of the 702 deputy mayors (out of all 753 deputy mayors in the country) we interviewed expressed their intention to run for mayor in the upcoming local elections. A remaining 40% of deputy mayor respondents had not decided, suggesting that the share of women who would like to run for mayor could be much higher.
In addition, nationally representative citizen surveys conducted by Kathmandu University, Interdisciplinary Analysts, and the Asia Foundation in 2018 and 2020 suggest that female local representatives have earned the trust of their constituents. In 2020, 80.6% of surveyed citizens said that they trusted their judicial committee, a dispute-resolving body headed by the deputy mayor, up from 73% in 2018. (The surveys did not directly ask about trust in deputy mayors.) Compare this to citizen trust in mayors, which hasn’t seen an increase between 2018 (81.8%) and 2020 (80.6%), although it has remained high.
However, these facts do not, in themselves, guarantee that women will advance. Experience from countries with a history of gender quotas in politics shows that it is challenging for women to graduate from quota-based positions to higher leadership roles. In Spain, where gender quotas that guarantee that at least 40% of candidates for local elections are women came into effect in 2007, researchers found that these quotas did not have any meaningful effect on women’s probability to reach powerful, non-reserved positions such as party leader or mayor in the next three rounds of elections (Bagues, Manuel, and Pamela Campa. "Can gender quotas in candidate lists empower women? Evidence from a regression discontinuity design." Journal of Public Economics 194 (2021): 104315).
Thus, to enhance women’s representation in the upcoming local elections, political parties have important roles to play. To start with, parties must create an environment that improves women’s chances to be nominated for mayor and ward chair candidacies. In 2017, a strikingly low number of women made it to the nominee list for these positions. For the fourteen districts where our research team has data on nominations, only 3.2% of nominees for mayors and only 2% of nominees for ward chairs were female. If parties want to achieve meaningful progress in gender inclusion, it is essential they expand their pool of female nominees for these leadership positions by removing barriers female aspirants face in the nomination process.
For women to receive candidate tickets, parties’ internal selection committees must decide to award them. This is much more likely, if women have voice in parties’ internal selection processes. This means nominating them to serve on candidate selection committees, especially in important positions. Our research using extensive data from the 2017 local elections highlights the extreme importance of parties' internal selection processes, by which parties choose a candidate for a race from a list of nominees, in determining who becomes a local representative in Nepal.
Given how consequential the candidate selection process is, we believe important gains in inclusion can be attained by encouraging selection committee members to be more welcoming of female nominees, and changing committee structure to empower female voices in these committees.
In the aftermath of the 2017 local elections, our research team conducted a survey of around one thousand selection committee members across eleven districts. During these surveys, we asked them to take the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a powerful experimental tool from social psychology that examines an individual’s implicit bias against a group. Our analysis shows that selection committee members had an easier time associating men than women with leadership traits. Thus, political parties should consider introducing reforms (e.g., de-bias training) that change the behavior of committee members to be less biased against female nominees.
Perhaps more importantly, political parties should ensure that the structure and composition of selection committees do not disadvantage female voices. One reason candidates for mayor and ward chair positions in 2017 were overwhelmingly male might be the paucity of female voices in selection committees: on average only 8% of selection committee members in 2017 were women. In the upcoming local elections, the gender composition of these committees will very likely improve in favor of women, especially because the Political Party Act of 2017 requires party committees at every level to be at least one-third female. But it is important to note that only a numeric increase in female representation in these committees might not go a long way in ensuring that female voices are heard and acted upon substantively. For example, female voices might get ignored when party officials in key positions (e.g., chairperson or secretary) – who tend to be mostly male – become the final arbiter in making selection decisions. It is therefore imperative to introduce reforms that empower female voices in these committees.
The elections of 2022 provide a remarkable opportunity to increase women’s representation in politics, and thereby build on the important achievements of 2017. This is not only good for social justice, it is also good for parties seeking to win elections. A large number of women, including those who have gained experience in local governance in the last four years, stand eager to make strides in their political career. They are trusted by their constituents, and this trust is growing. All of this suggests that they have a good chance of winning in many constituencies. The parties that pay attention to these important trends are the ones that are most likely to see success in 2022.
Read the Nepali version, published in Kantipur on January 13, 2022, here.