A Blocked Pipeline : Recruitment, Nomination, and Election of Women Candidates in Canadian Federal Elections, 2004-2019

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the question of women's descriptive underrepresentation in Canadian politics at the federal level. Previous studies of women's underrepresentation in Canada and elsewhere have largely focused on analysing the results of elections, and studies that do account for earlier factors such as recruitment and candidate selection are limited in their scopes. In this dissertation I analyse women's representation in a holistic manner, accounting for factors from the pre-nomination stage up through election. Conceptually, I approach the path to political office as a three-stage "representation pipeline," comprising candidate emergence, candidate selection, and election. I base my analysis on Elections Canada's records of nomination contests held by federal political parties for the 2004 through 2019 general elections, paired with relevant district-level demographic factors from the Canadian census. I complement this analysis with an original survey of nomination contestants in the 2019 election. I find that women's underrepresentation in Canada is determined chiefly by issues in candidate emergence, rather than by issues in candidate selection or electoral discrimination. Instead, nominations in Canada are in the strong majority of cases acclamations, making candidate emergence and election the only meaningful barriers to women's representation in most cases. Furthermore, women face a small but significant degree of electoral discrimination, with women having slightly lower odds then men of winning election even when controlling for their party's past performance in the district. Finally, I find that urban districts are more conducive to women's representation at all three stages of the representation pipeline.