Strength Matters: Voter Behaviours and Attitudes Towards Women Candidates in Papua New Guinea

Please note that this is a hybrid event. For online attendance please sign up to obtain the Zoom link. Access link will be delivered via email upon registration.

Does Papua New Guinea have a strong-woman concept? This pre-submission seminar examines voter behaviours and attitudes towards women candidates. Since 1972, only ten of the 714 women who contested national general elections became legislators.  Five out of the ten women are from the Southern region, two are from Momase and New Guinea Islands respectively and one is from the Highlands region. This presentation seeks to answer why half of the women elected to parliament come from the Southern region. Following a broad discussion of the experience of women candidates and MPs in PNG, the presentation focuses on the Southern region, and more specifically Rigo electorate as a case study to seek explanations.

Quantifying indigenous cultural values and norms informing their social and political behaviors and epistemology is difficult, as such, qualitative data collected in focus group discussions and interviews is used to illustrate more quantitative electoral data on votes cast in elections. The seminar presents a new measure of strength, namely the extent to which women candidates attract a number of votes above the average for the electorate, suggesting that women candidates who do not win their election can use this measure more accurately to understand their placing, and the attitudes of their electorate towards the viability of women candidates.

Speaker

Eileen Gobu Bobone is a PhD candidate with the Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. Her research concerns women’s political representation in the public domain and her paper looks at voter behaviours and attitudes towards female candidates in Rigo District, Central Province in Papua New Guinea. Prior to commencing her candidature with DPA in 2017, Eileen was a secondary school teacher. From 2009 to 2012, she was an undergraduate student at the University of Papua New Guinea. Eileen completed her Honours and was a part-time tutor until she won a scholarship to come to study at the ANU.