Gender and Elections in Post-Communist Ukraine

Abstract

Women remain underrepresented in the Ukrainian Verhkovna Rada nearly 20 years after independence from Soviet rule. Between 1994 and 2006 when Ukraine employed a single-member district system to elect all or at least part of the Rada, women were even less frequent than today. Yet, women in Ukraine did win elections even in an electoral system that has been shown in other countries to create signicant obstacles to women's representation. We argue that the likelihood of women winning elections was signicantly increased by two factors{partisanship and incumbency. Using a dataset of all candidates for Ukrainian majoritarian elections between 1994 and 2006, we test this argument. We nd that partisan and incumbent female candidates were more likely to win majoritarian elections than were other female candidates. Yet, the advantages of incumbency and partisanship were signicantly weaker than they were for male candidates.