Keeping women in their place? The prevalence of gender role attitudes among local party chairs in Flanders

The underrepresentation of women in elected assemblies is one of the fundamental problems modern democracies struggle with. This paper focuses on party selectors as one of the core actors on the demand side. By exploring which Flemish local party chairs hold conservative or progressive gender role attitudes, this paper moves beyond the formal dimensions of the political recruitment process. Our results demonstrate that although conservative gender role attitudes are only to a limited extent present among the Flemish local party chairs, there remains a significant part of the local chairs that does not fully endorse the idea that political responsibilities should be equally shared between men and women. Overall, male party chairs and rightist party chairs have more conservative gender role attitudes than their female and leftist counterparts. Taken together, our results suggest that in some parties, conservative gender role attitudes held by the party elite could help to understand the barriers faced by female aspirants, candidates and politicians alike.