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Doing Politics Differently? Applying a Feminist Institutionalist Lens to the U.K. Women's Equality Party

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2019

Elizabeth Evans Open the ORCID record for Elizabeth Evans [Opens in a new window]  and
Meryl Kenny
Elizabeth Evans
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths University of London
Meryl Kenny
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Abstract

The U.K. Women's Equality Party (WEP) was established in 2015 to “bring about change by winning—support, votes and seats.” It has thus far recruited tens of thousands of members and run candidates in European, national, devolved, and local elections. This article provides one of the first empirical analyses of this new actor in U.K. politics. Adopting a feminist institutionalist lens, we examine the extent to which WEP “does things differently” by looking at its discourse, formal party rules, and informal ways of doing things “on the ground.” Drawing on a set of semistructured interviews, observations of local and national party meetings, and document analysis, we argue that while WEP has to some extent tried to set up alternative participatory structures and new “ways of working,” it has also at times fallen back on more traditional, centralized, and hierarchical modes of party organizing, as well as informal practices that are more typically associated with male-dominated parties.

Keywords

Women's partiespolitical partiesU.K. politicsfeminist institutionalismfeminism
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 16 , Special Issue 1: Special Symposium on Women's Parties , March 2020 , pp. 26 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Mary Caputi, and participants at the UIC Gender Conference at the University of Manchester and the ECPG Conference in Lausanne for their helpful feedback on this article. We have had three children (between us) since starting this project and would like to thank our child care providers, without whom this article would not have been completed.

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