‘More Visible and Vulnerable to Attacks’ – Violence Against (local) Women Politicians and the Local Costs of Doing Politics

This article draws from a wider feminist institutionalist analysis of Welsh local government and women local councilors’ experiences, exploring specifically violence against women politicians and the subsequent local “costs of doing politics” for women. Drawing on data from 18 semi-structured interviews with women councilors during the 2017–2022 electoral period, first-hand accounts are explored. Incidences including acts of violence, abuse, and harassment committed by the public in public and offline, and by peers in the council chamber were discussed by participants, alongside feelings of being “at-risk.” Violence acts as a form of resistance to women’s electoral presence and is found to have a significant impact on women’s political representation. It affects descriptive representation, through discouraging prospective councilors and causing interviewees to question continuing in politics, and substantive representation by permeating political cultures, and silencing women’s voices by forcing them to change the way they “do politics.”