A ‘women's revolution from above’? Female leadership, intersectionality, and public policy under the Merkel government

Abstract

Internationally, the number of female leaders has increased in recent years. While the rise of women to political prominence has been explored over the last two decades, we know much less about their actual decision-making. The article investigates what role Merkel's gender has played for governance during her first term in office. Has female leadership made a difference for the substantive representation of women's interests and, if so, how? This article compares and contrasts two explicitly gender-related policy areas, reconciliation and anti-discrimination policy, in a most-similar-case design. While major reforms were passed in the realm of family policy, anti-discrimination policy was considered a marginal political concern. To explain the different outcomes this analysis focuses on the identities and interests of relevant political players in their institutional context. In order to better understand female leadership and governance we use the lens of intersectionality, which has a promising theoretical and empirical potential.