‘We campaign just by gathering 20 people’: suboptimal campaigning as a gendered campaign style in Medan, Indonesia

Abstract

How do we understand the gendered campaign styles of women candidates contesting elections in which they are structurally constrained with a low probability of success? We introduce the term ‘suboptimal campaigning’as a gendered campaign style to emphasise the accommodations women make due to broader gender orders that put them at an electoral disadvantage. Research with 24 female candidates in the 2024 local legislative elections in Medan, Indonesia, revealed their campaigns to be self-limiting in terms of where they campaign (spatial restrictions), who they target (predominantly women voters), when they campaign (temporal constraints) and what campaign practices they employ (limited financial investment and restricted activities). Rationalising female candidates’ decisions as strategically ‘running as a woman’obscures how Indonesia’s masculinised political institutions necessitate that women … Show more