Understanding women’s political participation: a case study of the United Kingdom
Rosie Campbell

In most established democracies women’s participation in politics has increased over the decades that have followed suffrage, but gender gaps remain. Women’s electoral turnout has largely caught up with men’s and in some contexts overtaken it. However, women remain less likely to be actively interested and engaged in politics, less likely to be party members, and less often stand for political office, although again many of these differences have diminished over time. Alongside this gradual increase in women’s political participation, we have seen gender gaps in party support emerge with women in many high-income countries shifting to the left of men. In this paper I explore the barriers and enablers to women’s political participation in the UK within in the context of the global literature. I ask whether increasingly hostile online political environments are likely to supress women’s participation or whether distinct gendered political values are emerging that support women’s political activity.

Rosie CAMPBELL
Rosie Campbell is professor of politics and director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GiWL) at King’s College London. The Institute works towards a world in which women of all backgrounds have fair and equal access to leadership.  Chaired by Julia Gillard, the only woman to have served as Prime Minister of Australia, the GiWL brings together rigorous research, practice and advocacy to break down the barriers to women becoming leaders, while challenging ideas of what leadership looks like.

Rosie has written extensively on political representation and is the principal investigator of the ESRC funded Representative Audit of Britain, which surveyed all candidates standing in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 British General Elections. She has presented six episodes of Radio Four’s Analysis and in 2020 she presented an episode of BBC Radio 4’s rethink series examining how COVID19 is accelerating changes to our world that were not expected until at least 2025.

SHIN Ki-young
Shin Ki-young is Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at Ochanomizu University. Research interests include women’s political representation, comparative women’s movements, #MeToo, and gender policies in East Asia. Organizer of the East Asian Research Network on Gender and Diversity in Political Representation (WondeR) for comparative research on women’s political representation in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Recent works are published in international journals including International Political Science Review, Politics & Gender, and Pacific Affairs, as well as numerous edited books.

OKI Naoko
Oki Naoko is Lecturer at Sugiyama Jogakuen University and Visiting Researcher, Institute for Global Leadership, Ochanomizu University. She received her Ph. D. in Gender and Politics in 2011. From 2018 she is the principal investigator of the research project “Seiji Juku” (Politics Academies) in the Candidate Recruitment Process: Implications for Women’s Political Participation” of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), JSPS. Her recent works on academic journals are “Promoting Women’s Participation in Local Election by Political Party Candidate Recruitment: A Case of Prefectural Assemblies in Japan” (2016), “Do the Seiji Juku (Politics Schools) Promote Women’s Political Participation in Japan?: An Examination of their Recruitment Systems” (2018), and “Recruitment of Female Candidates by Political Parties: Analysis of the Nation-wide Local Election in 2019” (2019). Her current research interests include women participation in local politics and political recruitment.

Myles CARROLL

Myles Carroll is an Assistant Professor in the divisions of Global Studies for Intercultural Cooperation and Gender and Social Science and Researcher at the Institute for Global Leadership, Ochanomizu University. His research examines the political economy of Japan, using social reproduction theory and Gramscian hegemony theory to explore Japanese political economy from the post-war era to the present from a critical and feminist perspective. He teaches in the areas of international political economy and labor economics at the undergraduate level and comparative political economy and gender political economy at the graduate level. He has published articles in various journals, including The Japanese Political Economy, Capital & Class and Critical Sociology, and will publish a book, The Making of Modern Japan: Power, Crisis, and the Promise of Transformation in November 2021.