Forma de registro al seminario de investigación del Programa para el Estudio de la Violencia del CIDE, Primavera 2022.

1 de abril de 2022, 11am-12.30pm

Gendered Vulnerabilities: Perceptions of Political Violence among Mexican Politicians

Sofia Collignon, University of London
Jennifer M. Piscopo, Occidental College

Recent debates on the interrelationship between gender, politics, and violence ask: do women politicians face violence because aggressors are seeking to keep women subordinate (violence against women in politics), or do women face the same political violence as men, albeit with some differences in forms (gendered political violence)? Answering this question becomes particularly difficult in national contexts where political violence is commonplace, as in Mexico. To disentangle violence against women in politics from gendered political violence, we surveyed Mexican candidates for federal, state, and local office about their experiences with violence. We find that women respondents believe that women politicians are more threatened and more unsafe than men, with large majorities perceiving that women are attacked because of their gender. Yet we find few systematic differences in the forms of attacks and perpetrators: for instance, women and men are equally likely to say they receive threats and equally likely to identify aggressors as members of rival parties followed by members of their own party. Our results suggest that political violence in Mexico affects both men and women in similar ways, but that women understand their experiences differently. Women perceive themselves as (potential) victims of violence against women in politics, rather than victims of ‘just’ political violence. Policymakers may need to tackle the systems of patriarchal privilege that contribute to women’s insecurity, even if these systems themselves are not (always) driving the actual violence.