Prime ministers in waiting? Women leaders of the opposition in Westminster systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the key defining features of Westminster-type democracies is the acknowledgement of an official Opposition and a Leader of the Opposition typically referred to as a ‘prime minister in waiting’. This article focuses on this crucial element of Westminster democracy and applies a gender perspective, looking into women Leaders of the Opposition in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (1975–2022). As this inquiry reveals, there have been few and mostly short-lived women Leaders of the Opposition. Further, contrary to plausible assumptions, there have been more women Leaders of the Opposition from conservative than from left-wing parties. In particular, however, the office of Leader of the Opposition has, with few exceptions, not proven to be a springboard to the premiership. In fact, a majority of women prime ministers were ‘takeover prime ministers’, inheriting the office from a predecessor from their own party, rather than former Leaders of the Opposition, while many women Leaders of the Opposition were not even given the opportunity to lead their party into a national election campaign. The article discusses possible explanations for these patterns.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".