Are populist parties fostering women's political representation in Poland? A comment on Kostadinova and Mikulska

In a recent contribution to Party Politics, Kostadinova and Mikulska analyze women's political representation by populist parties in Poland and Bulgaria. The presented findings for Poland suggest that the main right-wing populist party PiS (1) elected more women to parliament, (2) nominated more women to promising ballot positions, and (3) that voters of PiS were more likely to support women in the elections compared to leftists parties. We disagree with all three findings. While the first finding is due to an error in the descriptive statistics, we argue that the other two findings are the result of an inappropriate research design. We replicate the analysis based on an altered research design and show that PiS did not elect more women to parliament, did not nominate more women to promising ballot positions and that voters of PiS were not more likely to vote for female candidates.