BRATISLAVA, October 7, (WEBNOVINY) — There are still not enough women on the political scene in Slovakia, even though surveys show that Slovak voters do not trust male politicians more than female ones. Zuzana Butorova of the think-tank Public Affairs Institute (IVO) presented results of a post-election survey on behavior of voters and related themes on Thursday. As she informed, in parliamentary elections held in June, only 15.3 percent of the members of parliament elected were women, which is even less than in the previous elections in 2006 when it was 16 percent. “Everything depends on how the parties line up their candidate list,” Butorova said, adding that this is a very low number because for a more significant influence in political decision-making, at least one-third of elected women is needed.
In the parliamentary elections in June, there were two poles, Butorova said. On one pole, there was SDKU-DS which had strong female personalities in the forefront who were seen as trustworthy by the public and got a lot of preferential votes as well. On the other pole, there were parties which put insignificant types of female politicians pro forma on its candidate list. As a new phenomenon in Slovak politics, Butorova marked the fact that SDKU-DS as one of the key political parties elected a woman as their election leader, who also became the prime minister. However, this does not mean that the gender issue has progressed because in order to strengthen the position of women in society, this topic needs to become a government’s priority, she said.
The requirement of gender balance on candidate lists was respected most satisfactorily by SDKU-DS and KDH. SMER-SD and MOST-HID respected it in the least extent. On average for all parliamentary parties, women got 18.7 percent of preferential votes, while their percentage on the candidate lists was 17.8. The highest proportion of preferential votes was received by women in SDKU-DS (45.8 percent), followed by SNS (25.6 percent) the lowest in SMER-SD (5.6 percent) and MOST-HID (7.3 percent). KDH and SaS also had slightly bellow-average proportion figures.
The theme of gender equality was one of the topics of the survey which was carried out in cooperation of IVO, Sociological Institute of Slovak Academy of Sciences and Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Comenius University. The survey was conducted by TNS SK agency on a representative sample of 1,203 voters between June 18 and July 20 of this year. For the first time, the survey is a part of international project Comparative Studies of Voting Systems which has been realized in dozens of countries from the whole world for many years.
SITA
