Selecting women, electing women : political representation and candidate selection in Latin America

Selecting Women, Electing Women is a groundbreaking book that examines how the rules for candidate selection affect women's political representation in Latin America. Magda Hinojosa tests the effects of selection procedures on women's representation and offers a thoroughly researched account of women's political participation in Chile and Mexico. Hinojosa presents counterintuitive assumptions about factors that promote the election of women. She insists that primaries-which are regularly thought of as the most "democratic" process for choosing candidates-actually produce fewer female nominees than centralized and seemingly exclusionary candidate selection procedures. Hinojosa astutely points out the role of candidate selection processes in explaining variation in women's representation that exists both across and within political parties. Selecting Women, Electing Women makes critical inroads to the study of gender and politics, candidate selection, and Latin American politics.