Banca de DEFESA: LILIANE GOBETTI FAGUNDES

WOMEN IN DIRECTIONS OF BRAZILIAN PARTY BODIES: An exploratory analysis

Political parties. Intra-party democracy. Party organization. Gender.

Does the level of intra-party democracy of political parties influence the participation of women in leadership positions? This was the guiding question of the present dissertation. In order to relate the issues of intra-party democracy, gender and representation, the work has as a general objective to observe the participation of women in positions in the national party organizations. The main hypothesis is that the higher the rate of intra-party democracy, the higher the inclusion of women in office in party bodies. The methodology consisted in using the same approach, with the construction of the gender inclusion index, which measures the percentage of women present in the Brazilian party organizations and relates it to the intraparty democracy index of Salgado (2020). The initial hypothesis wasn’t corroborated, since the party presenting a high index of intraparty democracy did not mean having a higher index of gender inclusion.