This book argues that understanding how women become presidents or prime ministers requires quantitative description of their pathways to power. To this end, it considers three possible routes: via family ties, through political activism, or by means of a political career. The authors analyzed all elected, appointed, or interim female presidents and prime ministers from 1990 to 2020 (136 in total). In much of its conceptualization, empirical strategy, and data, this book builds on Farida Jalalzai’s landmark study on women chief executives worldwide (Shattered, Cracked or Firmly Intact? Women and the Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide, 2013).
Chapter 1 reminds readers that the United States has never elected a female president, and many questions remain regarding women’s pathways to becoming presidents or prime ministers. The next three chapters describe three paths to chief executive power. Chapter 2 points out that in early scholarship the family path appeared to be a relatively common route, particularly in Asia when countries such as Sri Lanka and India began producing women national leaders in the 1960s. Latin American women early on seemed to obtain chief executive power via family ties too, but this has become less frequent (Jalalzai, Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? 2016). Drawing on modernization theories, the authors assert that countries in which women gain chief executive power via family ties tend to feature “substantial amounts of cultural, voter and institutional sexism” (p. 41). This claim previews one of the book’s main findings: women in unstable, less democratic countries are more likely to obtain national power via family ties than through political activism or political careers.
Chapter 3 explores the least trodden path: political activism. Just 18 of the 136 women national leaders (13%) took the activist path from 1960 to 2020 (p. 48). Here, the authors seem right in reclassifying Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro as a political activist, rather than a woman who leveraged family ties to office (p. 52). Chapter 4 describes the political career route as the dominant pathway to national power (101 of 136 women chief executives). The descriptive statistics here suggest that women tend to gain experience from serving in cabinets rather than in legislatures. Future research could theorize this empirical pattern: Might it have to do with the fact that ministers generally are appointed by chief executives, whereas legislators are popularly elected?
Chapter 5, using data from 1990 to 2015, seeks to understand which country-level factors statistically drive whether women obtain chief executive power via family ties, political activism, or a political career. The dependent variable consists of dichotomized categories: for example, family ties vs. activist/career. Some evidence suggests that women are more likely to ascend via family ties than via political activism or political careers in less democratic countries, as measured by Freedom House scores. Other results are consistent with the hypothesis that women rise via political careers rather than family ties or political activism in semi-presidential and parliamentary regimes and in multiparty systems. Institutions in these ways seem to somewhat track women’s pathways to power. Chapter 6 develops models where the unit of analysis is not the woman leader, but rather country-years; it finds that countries with stronger democracies and multiparty systems are more likely to be governed by women. It also finds that countries with previous experiences with women national leaders are more likely to produce a(nother) female chief executive. Chapter 7 uses count models to estimate determinants of how long women stayed in office from 1990 to 2015. The results here reveal little evidence for its hypothesized country-level variables: neither the quality of democracy, human development index, nor political institutions reaches statistical significance.
Chapter 8 narrates the failed presidential campaigns of two women with family ties: Hillary Clinton of the United States and Marine Le Pen of France. This chapter draws on extensive scholarship on Clinton’s presidential bids, as well as a handful of sources from national outlets such as CNN and the Wall Street Journal (pp. 178, 179). The Le Pen case study similarly relies on English-language news sources such as the Telegraph and the Guardian. This chapter’s focus on campaign-level factors such as scandals and debate performances contrasts with the previous chapters’ emphasis on country-level determinants such as institutions. Returning to national factors, the authors conclude that the Clinton and Le Pen cases show that “the family path is not a viable path to executive office in stable, economically developed democratic countries with low levels of patriarchy, at least not globally powerful Western nations” (p. 199).
Chapter 9 reiterates the book’s strengths as a quantitative global study. The book helpfully updates Jalalzai’s original dataset, and its appendix provides paragraph-long biographies of the world’s female presidents and prime ministers from 2010 to 2020. Some of the book’s quantitative findings are consistent with extant research. They show once again that it is more difficult for women to become presidents than prime ministers; greater numbers of women legislators are associated with greater likelihoods of women chief executives; and the family pathway to power is less common than conventional wisdom might expect.
The classification of female presidents and prime ministers according to their pathways to power is foundational to the book’s analysis and conclusions. The authors maintain that women chief executives should be coded as pursuing one of three paths to office because this strategy allows scholars to identify which variables drive specific paths (p. 25). They coded instances when women combined two or more of these paths in their early involvement in politics (pp. 6, 47). However, it is unclear whether any woman born into a political family should by default be classified as taking the family ties route. This coding rule also raises the broader question of why it might be more analytically useful to focus on how women initially entered politics, rather than which experiences provided the springboards to becoming chief executives.
Two prominent cases of women presidents in Latin America—Michelle Bachelet and Dilma Rousseff—are categorized as political activists rather than political careerists, illustrating this point (p. 57). Bachelet was briefly tortured during Chile’s military dictatorship, and although she supported a return to democracy, she was not a nationally recognized leader of the democratic movement. Most interpretations of Bachelet’s rise to the presidency point to her serving as Minister of Health and Defense as the catalyst to her selection as the Concertación’s presidential nominee. As a young person Rousseff also was imprisoned and tortured for three years during Brazil’s military dictatorship, but these experiences hardly created opportunities for a presidential run. Her extraordinary performance as President Luiz Inácio da Silva’s chief of staff instead provided a launching point for her presidential campaign. In short, coding these women as accessing presidential power via political activism may be misleading.
Deciding how to code cases to maximize their analytical usefulness remains a perennial challenge in global studies of women chief executives. This book nevertheless constitutes a notable attempt to detect global patterns in how women obtain chief executive power. In separate analyses of prime ministers and presidents, other scholarship theorizes how women come to lead major parties to govern in parliamentary regimes (Karen Beckwith, “Before Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and Gendered Party Leadership Contests,” Politics & Gender 11 [4], 2015) or how they become viable presidential candidates (Catherine Reyes-Housholder and Gwynn Thomas, “Gendered Incentives, Party Support and Viable Female Presidential Candidates in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 53 [2], 2021). This book, in contrast, groups female prime ministers and presidents together and describes how country-level factors, such as level of democracy and political institutions, could determine which paths women take to become national leaders. Its quantitative description significantly contributes to the growing research on women and executive politics worldwide.
