Rebecca Evans a professor in the Politics and International Relations Department at Ursinus College in Collegeville Pa. says the election shows that women are fully accepted as political candidates in Brazil rather than being seen as outsiders.
Although the runoff election on October 26 is between incumbent President Dilma Rousseff and second-place finisher Aceio Neves, the strong showing by challenger Marina Silva shows that voters in Brazil widely accept female leadership, with close to two-thirds of the electorate voting for a female candidate.
“The election demonstrates that Brazil has matured to the point of a viable race between candidates who represent different party platforms and are not typecast by gender,” said Dr. Evans. Silva was not disadvantaged by her gender but rather by negative ads from the Rousseff campaign as well as concerns that her fragile party base would handicap her effectiveness in pushing through reform. Like Silva, Neves has criticized the government’s costly spending on infrastructure projects and corruption, promising to bring down inflation and promote growth through fiscal responsibility.
“What makes Brazil interesting is that voters are not prejudiced against female leaders," says Dr. Evans, “and in fact some studies show a bias in favor of female candidates.” While this does not translate into a higher percentage of women in Brazil’s Congress, where electoral rules allow party leaders to continue an old boys’ network, at the level of presidential politics, voters fully accept women as strong presidential candidates.
Associate Professor of Politics and Department Chair Rebecca Evans got her BA from Purdue University with majors in German and Political Science. She spent a year in Cologne, Germany as a Fulbright fellow where she did research on the Greens, an environmental political party. She completed her MA in Political Science at Purdue and her Ph.D. at Harvard where she turned to the study of Latin American politics, focusing on organized labor and the breakdown of democracy in Argentina and Chile. Her current research focuses on human rights policy and women and political leadership in Latin America. She is the author of “Latin America’s Pink Tide: Women and Presidential Leadership in Comparative Perspective.” Paper presented at annual meeting of the International Studies Association Northeast, in Philadelphia in November 2013.
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