ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the necessity of paying more attention to local and non-Western contexts of gender and LGBTQ issues and elections. We identify key main themes found in the literature with regard to the relationship between gender and elections: barriers for women to accessing public offices; reasons for the permanency of such barriers; institutional remedies for challenging such barriers; and gender-dependent electoral behaviour. Similarly, we identify core topics relating to the intersections between elections and LGBTQ issues: LGBTQ campaign and media discourse, LGBTQ voters’ electoral behaviour, LGBTQ candidates’ electoral successes and failures. We point out that these studies are mainly Western-oriented and use a quantitative methodology based on data from electoral pools or public sources. We define the aim of the book as an attempt to find some other – mostly qualitative – ways of analysing the relationship between gender and LGBTQ issues and elections and the need to deal with studies on both central and local levels of political systems and societies.
