Mention the 50:50 Campaign to a Malawian voter, politician or activist, and chances are high they are going to voice a firmly held opinion.
Since the 2009 election, this marketing campaign to advertise girls’s political illustration has develop into an integral a part of the Malawian electoral panorama.
Come election time, Malawians are bombarded by radio jingles and conferences explaining why they need to think about girls candidates within the push for gender equality in elected decision-making place.
Women standing in native and nationwide campaigns distribute 50:50 campaign-branded clothes to voters, and newspapers are full of discussions on the challenges going through the comparatively small variety of girls struggling to acquire political workplace.
Critics of the marketing campaign for equal illustration of women and men in politics have argued that the initiative doesn’t do sufficient to counter the various challenges girls candidates encounter.
Elections in Malawi are costly. While the 50:50 marketing campaign has swayed the Malawi Electoral Commission to cut back registration charges for girls candidates, the sum of money wanted to run for workplace remains to be unattainable to most ladies candidates.
Others have argued that the marketing campaign doesn’t essentially handle the financial, cultural or institutional obstacles going through girls candidates.
Still, advocates of the programme have pointed to the truth that girls’s illustration in Malawi is steadily rising, from 15 p.c in 2004 to 23 p.c after the final 2019 election.
Compared to neighbouring international locations with comparable structural circumstances, like Zambia and Botswana, Malawi elects significantly extra girls and the difficulty of girls’s political illustration seems to function rather more prominently on the political agenda.
In an article just lately revealed within the Journal of Politics, we research whether or not civic academic campaigns, just like the 50:50 Campaign, can work to inspire voters to pick out girls candidates.
Despite a lot cynicism about such campaigns, we discover that they will. However, messages matter.
Voters will reply in a different way to civic training campaigns relying on the explanations given to vote for girls.
To research the effectiveness of gender campaigns, we enrolled greater than 2 200 randomly chosen Malawians throughout 12 constituencies in a survey experiment. The members have been randomly divided into three teams.
In the primary group, members watched a cartoon industrial produced by the 50:50 Campaign. The industrial featured two arguments: That girls are competent leaders and that ladies usually face discrimination when operating for workplace.
In the second group, members watched an analogous industrial, however the message was totally different. This time, members once more realized that ladies are competent leaders. But fairly than studying in regards to the discrimination girls face, we knowledgeable members in regards to the progress girls have made in Malawi politics.
In a 3rd management group, we confirmed members a non-political, irrelevant industrial.
After watching the commercials, we let members select between pairs of parliamentary candidates. We diversified the gender of the candidate in addition to different essential attributes like their occasion affiliation, improvement priorities, academic background and occupation.
The take a look at is designed to measure how a lot every of the commercials affected the likelihood of a respondent choosing a lady candidate.
We discovered that the commercials have been efficient. Comparing the respondents who acquired both of the 50:50 Campaign messages to those who watched the non-political industrial, respondents who watched the 50:50 message have been considerably extra prone to decide a lady candidate.
But, crucially, the message issues enormously. Respondents who acquired the optimistic message have been considerably extra prone to decide a lady candidate than these studying about discrimination.
These findings have important implications for these designing comparable campaigns. When voters be taught in regards to the discrimination going through girls, they could react with a resolve to rectify such injustices.
However, they could additionally obtain this message as affirmation {that a} vote for a lady candidate is a wasted vote.
If voters consider that others is not going to vote for a lady, why ought to they?
Especially in African elections the place viability is essential and entry to future clientelistic rewards could also be contingent on supporting a winner.
Instead, our analysis means that gender campaigns ought to think about a extra optimistic message aimed toward rising voters’ belief in girls’s governing skills, but additionally of their capability to win elections.
As Malawians return to the polls in 2025, the 50:50 marketing campaign is but once more gaining momentum as an integral a part of the electoral panorama.
Although short-term campaigns won’t ever be sufficient to eradicate important inequalities between ladies and men vying for energy, the world has a lot to be taught from the best way Malawi’s 50:50 marketing campaign is rising in power and class.
Seeberg is an affiliate professor on the Aarhus University.
George Ofosu is an assistant professor on the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Michael Wahman is affiliate professor on the Michigan State University