In anticipation of the extraordinary parliamentary elections that will be held in a few days, the Centre for Civic Education (CCE) has published the publication “Who does Montenegro choose? – Gender, Age, Geographic, and Professional Structure of Electoral Lists in the 2023 Extraordinary Parliamentary Elections”. For the first time, the publication provides the citizens of Montenegro with a deeper cross-section of the electoral offers through the structure of the candidates on the electoral lists, thereby contributing to their information, as well as the transparency of the entire electoral process.
In general, in terms of gender structure, all lists met the legal norm of at least 30% female candidates, so in the total of 1113 candidates, 64% men and 36% women are on the lists. Only one of the 15 lists is headed by a woman, but the same list has a percentage of represented women significantly above the average – 58%, and it is the list YES. WE CAN FOR CITIZEN MONTENEGRO. It is interesting that in addition to that list, two lists of national minority parties are above the average – the Bosniak Party (BS) and the Croatian Civic Initiative (HGI) with 41% women each, as well as the coalition gathered around the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) with 40% of women, while in most of the others the percentage of women’s representation remains within the limits of the legal minimum or below these that are highlighted.
The age structure is heterogeneous, and the average age of those who want to represent citizens in the next convocation is 41 years old. In this context, the youngest list is JUSTICE FOR ALL! – DR VLADIMIR LEPOSAVIĆ with an average age of 33 years, and the oldest HGI with an average age of 51 years.
When it comes to the regional structure, there is a significant disparity in the distribution of candidates by the municipality, with candidates from the Capital City dominating, which make up 23.9% of the total number. No list offered candidates included all municipalities, and the closest to that were the list gathered around DPS, the coalition of Democrats and URA, and the coalition of SNP and DEMOS. Minority lists of Albanians and Croats have the smallest coverage of municipalities.
The candidates are characterized by a variety of professions, and for the purposes of the analysis, a categorization of 13 areas was made. Within this framework, a fifth of the candidates are from the field of economics and management, followed by education and science, then law, while there are the least of pensioners.
The data has been processed in a way that does not reveal personal data about candidates for MPs, but provide all the relevant information set by the research task. An individual cross-section for 15 election lists is also given.
The author of the publication is Milijana Radulović, who is employed in the State Election Commission (SEC), and the collaborator on its preparation is Damir Suljević from the CCE, who is also a member of the SEC on behalf of the civic sector and the academic community.
The publication was produced with the support of the Core grant of the SMART Balkan regional project – Civil society for a connected Western Balkans, which is implemented by the Center for the Promotion of Civil Society (CPCD), the Center for Research and Public Policy (CRPM) and the Institute for Democracy and Mediation (IDM), and financially supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Norway.
Maja Marinović, Programme Associate