David Seawright

“Cameron 2010”: An Exemplification of Personality-Based Campaigning

This article examines the Conservative party election campaign of 2010 and in particular the role of its leader, David Cameron, and of the role of his close coterie of advisers who would become known as “Cameron Central.” We see that David Cameron is all too aware of the increasing importance of the trends in “the personalization of politics” and all too willing to acquiesce in them. Moreover, the first ever prime ministerial television debates would effectively derail the campaign plan and undermine the effectiveness of “a central theme,” which could give an organized core and meaning to the campaign. Indeed, we shall see that “Cameron 2010” neatly encapsulates what was the 2010 Conservative party election campaign.

Peter Dorey, British Conservatism: The politics and philosophy of inequality, reviewed by David Seawright

the time of her fieldwork, Mexico had passed a gender quota law while, as of today, Chile has not. The informal nature of political recruitment and the deviation from the rules laid out in official party documents generate a nonnegligible empirical challenge: ‘(p)arties prefer to appear more ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘democratic’’ and therefore will claim to be using primaries or, at the least, deny their use of dedazos’ (p. 88). Hence, the author gathered information on candidate selection processes not only from party documents, but also through interviews with local, regional and national party officials, academics, and political consultants. Furthermore, a party’s nomination procedure is not static over time nor across space (parties often employ a variety of selection mechanisms simultaneously, for example, in diverse districts or for different offices). This is a point that Hinojosa illustrates well in her case studies. A question that lingers, though, is: what accounts for a party’s choice of its selection procedure in each instance? In the empirical chapters, the author assesses two alternative explanations: ideology and party gender quotas. While theoretical and comparative work on other regions leads to expectations that leftist parties will be more likely to support female candidacies, this does not seem to be the case in Latin America. Indeed, Hinojosa’s study of Chile finds that women in right-wing parties (especially, the Unión Demócrata Independiente or UDI) are much better represented in local-level politics than women from parties of the left, including those that have gender quotas. She makes a persuasive case that the difference is due to the UDI’s reliance on exclusive-centralized selection. Going forward, two issues may be worthy of further investigation. First, the Chilean right has been an early and consistent champion of female political participation, not out of ideological commitment but out of electoral/strategic considerations (Errázuriz Tagle, 2005; Maza Valenzuela, 1995), and this might be related to its sponsorship of more female candidates. Second, data on the gender composition of both the party membership and the district, as well as on patterns of gender voting, could be brought into the analysis in a more systematic way. In Chapter 7, Hinojosa explores the candidacies of political widows, wives, and daughters (that is, women who are part of power networks). Her discussion casts doubt on the notion that dedazos create the conditions necessary for such women to come to power. By contrast, she contends that the latter’s candidacies emerge from all forms of selection because their family connections eliminate the obstacles created by self-nomination and local power monopolies. The most provocative argument made in Selecting Women, Electing Women is that while primaries are generally heralded as the most democratic process for choosing party nominees, they pose a significant hurdle to women’s candidacies (p. 60). The author, therefore, anticipates that ‘(t)he current trend toward the adoption of primaries . . .will have negative, if unintended, consequences for women’s abilities to enter politics’ (p. 155). According to Hinojosa, one of the reasons that primaries are problematic for women is that they advantage those with monetary resources. Thus, in future work, it would be interesting to examine the impact of primaries on female candidacies under different campaign finance regimes. Chapter 8 provides an overview of gender quotas, which have been adopted by more than two-thirds of the countries in Latin America. Hinojosa underscores that in order to appraise the operation of such quotas we need to understand how they interact with candidate-selection processes. She holds that, when well-written (that is, with placement requirements and good enforcement mechanisms), nationally mandated quotas have had dramatic results. In the concluding chapter, she also recommends other strategies to alleviate the gendered effects of parties’ selection procedures (for example, to earmark funds for women). Selecting Women, Electing Women is a very good book for those concerned not only with the politics of gender but also with the democratization of parties in Latin America. It reviews critical issues, proposes an account of female political under-representation that challenges received ideas, and raises interesting questions for further research.

Book review: The conservative party: From Thatcher to CameronBaleTimThe conservative party: From Thatcher to Cameron. (2010) Cambridge: Polity Press. (2010) £25.00 (hbk), 504 pp. 9780745648576.

pieces of theory building on quota implementation and a valuable tool for future single case and comparative studies. The book is highly readable (though sometimes a little repetitive) and accessible for students, but is at the same time innovative and hence a must for specialists in the field of women’s representation, especially gender quotas. The frameworks for analysis, the rich data-paired case studies and the appendices on different types of quotas worldwide will be of interest to them. The book is also of importance for neo-institutionalists and methodologists interested in the ‘middle range’ approach that marries the advantages of large and small ‘n’ analysis and enables crossand within-case comparisons. It goes without saying that this research is of great interest to electoral reform scholars, although Krook could have facilitated this engagement. She frames quotas foremost as a reform of candidate selection and not as electoral reform. Somewhat disappointing is the limitation of representation to numerical, descriptive representation; other dimensions of representation (e.g. symbolic or substantive) are left untouched. But rather than being fundamental critiques, these remarks point to the potential of this innovative and encompassing account for future studies on gender quotas, electoral systems and political representation.