Contemporaneous Female Political Participation

Data Collection Methodology

The overarching aim of the data collection process was to collate data on female political representation at the local government level. A primary investigator and lead research assistant (1 female, 1 male) oversaw the initial composition of the dataset and identified the necessary variables to be included. The data is presented in a tabular format, with each row detailing unique information about winning candidates at various local administrative levels.

Teams consisting of two post-graduate economics students from Stellenbosch University in South Africa (1 male, 1 female) were tasked with sourcing local election data for all Sub-Saharan African countries that hold sub-national elections. Data was primarily sourced from the respective countries’ electoral commissions. Other sources for obtaining election data included, inter alia; election reports by NGO’s¹, researchers at other academic institutions, embassies and numerous local government organizations. Where required, the collected data was verified by a secondary source. All data entries were monitored and verified by the lead research assistant in order to minimize the probability of transcription errors.

If the researchers were certain that gender identifying data could not be obtained a two-fold methodology to determining the gender of winning candidates was adopted. Firstly, researchers worked in their teams to find gender identifying information for each individual winning candidate. This was achieved by finding gender specific pronouns in relevant news articles, reports and government statements that mentioned the winning candidate. If gender specific pronouns could not be sourced then researchers identified the winning candidates on a variety of social networks in order to identify the gender.

The second approach to determining the gender of winning candidates was by making use of a gender specific, names database. Gender API (2017) provides a comprehensive, country specific, names database which was used to query the gender of an individual using their first name as an identifier. For more information about which countries required the use of Gender API please visit the Supplementary Information page.