1 When women campaign, do they win? Isabelle Engeli * & Georg Lutz # * University of Ottawa, Isabelle.Engeli@uOttawa.ca # FORS, University of Lausanne, georg.lutz@fors.unil.ch Paper to be presented at the CCS Meeting, 27-29 January, Mannheim 2012 Abstract In this paper we look at the influence of campaign activities, past political experience on the electoral success of women candidates compared to male candidates. We use data from the Swiss comparative candidate survey conducted after the 2007 national elec- tions. Out of 3100 candidates, 1700 participated in this survey which included a large range of questions related to campaign activities, past political experience as well as policy positions. Switzerland’s open list PR electoral system is very favourable to study the impact of candidate gender on electoral success. In order to get elected, candidates have to get more preference votes than the competitors from their own party. In a first step, we show that men differ from women with respect to campaign activities and also previous political experience. Women spend less money, they focus their cam- paign more often to benefit the party instead of their own candidature and they less often hold positions in party or political offices at the lower level. However, women do not worse in the political competition. Once we take into account incumbent advantage – where more men are incumbent - the ratio of elected women is about the ratio of the female candidates. When we model candidate success measured as the number of pref- erence votes for individual candidates we do not find that women receive fewer votes than men on party ballots either. Keywords: women’s representation, open ballot PR system, electoral campaign