Interpersonal resources and insider/outsider dynamics in party office

Abstract

While the multiple barriers women face to attain public office have been vastly documented, the operation of insider/outsider dynamics within political parties’ top decision-making bodies remains largely under-researched. This article provides new theoretical and empirical insights on how interpersonal resources create ingroups and outgroups in parties’ national executive committees—the body that manages the day-to-day functioning of the extra-parliamentary party organization. Our comparative analysis of Spanish political parties in the period 1975–2020 documents that interpersonal resources are unevenly distributed across gender. Most crucially, we show that these resources play out differently for women and men members, with embeddedness in party networks only helping the latter attain positional power and extend their tenure in party office. These heterogeneous effects suggest that top decision-making party bodies do not just reflect existing gender inequalities but reinforce them in significant ways, rendering women member outsiders on the inside.