Women's Descriptive Representation Research Articles

Striking out women: preferential voting and gender bias in Latvian Saeima elections

ABSTRACT The 2018 parliamentary elections were a watershed year for women in Latvian politics where women's descriptive representation increased from 18% to 31% in one election with no gender quota. This paper explores this significant gain by examining ranked choice (positive and negative) preference voting in the Latvian Saeima (parliament) elections. The results show that small institutional changes increased the pool of candidates and countered stagnant levels of women's representation. Though female candidates were less likely to have their names struck out on party lists, women received fewer pluses than their male counterparts, revealing gender bias against female candidates.

Gender differences in the impact of electoral victory on satisfaction with democracy

Dozens of studies have shown that individuals who voted for the winning party in an election tend to be more satisfied with democracy than those who did not. However, a number of recent studies—many using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)—demonstrate that this relationship varies according to individual- and election-level factors. In this paper, we introduce for the first time gender as a modifier of the effect of winning on satisfaction. We advance a theoretical argument about why gender, independent of its many correlates, should shape the extent to which electoral victory induces satisfaction. Specifically, we argue that the winning effect should be smaller for women than for men because of (1) gender-based differences in political socialization and (2) gaps in the symbolic connection with candidates and parties. Given this, we also expect that the gender gap in satisfaction is moderated by women's descriptive representation. To test our expectations, we use surveys from Modules I-IV of the CSES coupled with macro-level data sources. Results indicate a robust and precisely estimated gender-based disparity in the impact of winning on satisfaction, with its magnitude being comparatively small among women. This gap is smaller where women are well represented in the legislature, though the gender of the chief executive does not play a conditioning role.

Gender Quotas and International Reputation

AbstractThe global spread of electoral gender quotas has been characterized as one of the most significant institutional developments of the last 30 years. Many of the countries that have adopted these laws designed to increase women's political representation are electoral autocracies that have otherwise‐stark gender inequalities. Some scholars argue that electoral authoritarian states have adopted quotas as a strategy for improving their international reputations for democracy. This article represents the first exploration of whether quotas really generate reputational boosts. Using large‐scale survey experiments in Sweden and the United States concerning hypothetical developing countries, we find that they do. In particular, audiences perceived electoral autocracies as more democratic and were more likely to support giving them foreign aid when women's descriptive representation was greater. Beyond its contribution to our understanding of gender quotas and women's representation, this article contributes to broader debates about international reputation, human rights, and foreign aid attitudes.

Transnational organizing, the boosting effect, and women’s legislative caucuses in Africa

ABSTRACT The share of women holding legislative office in Africa more than doubled between 1998 and 2019, reaching almost 24%. Despite this increase in women's descriptive representation, women members of parliaments (MPs) continue to encounter exclusionary masculinized environments. One way to facilitate women’s work in these male-dominated parliaments is through the creation of Women’s Legislative Caucuses (WLCs). This article explores the diffusion of WLCs across Africa and examines the factors that influence caucus functioning. The establishment of WLCs in Africa began in 1993 with the creation of a women’s caucus in Ghana. Caucus formation sped up in the 2000s, peaking in 2007. This trend has touched all regions of Africa, with 38 countries having established WLCs as of 2015. We identify critical actors at international, regional, and national levels involved in WLC establishment and examine how their collaboration generates a boosting effect that amplifies the voices and gender equity work of women MPs and feminist civil society. We argue that transnational collaboration can boost domestic advocacy but only when it leverages global and regional resources in ways that bring domestically situated civil society organizations into the halls of formal political power.

Public support for “more” women in Congress

ABSTRACT Is political knowledge about the actual level of women's representation still related to support for women's descriptive representation? Using data from the 2018 CCES, I find that knowledge of the level of women's presence in Congress is related to support for women's representation. Consistent with findings from prior research, those who overestimate the percentage of women in Congress are less supportive of electing “more” women whereas those who underestimate the percentage of women are more supportive. Importantly, support for electing more women is not the same as electing more women of color to Congress: the public is slightly less supportive of electing more “women of color” than more “women,” indicating that at least some voters are sensitive to question wording and that support for women's descriptive representation is conditional on race.

Who Does What Work in a Ministerial Office: Politically Appointed Staff and the Descriptive Representation of Women in Australian Political Offices, 1979–2010

Women are underrepresented within political institutions, which can (negatively) impact policy outcomes. We examine women’s descriptive representation as politically appointed staff within ministerial offices. Politically appointed staff are now institutionalised into the policy process, so who they are is important. To date, collecting systematic data on political staff has proved impossible. However, for the first time we demonstrate how to build a systematic data set of this previously unobservable population. We use Australian Ministerial Directories (telephone records) from 1979 to 2010 (a method that can notionally be replicated in advanced democratic jurisdictions), to examine political advising careers in a similar manner as elected political elites. We find that work in political offices is divided on gender lines: men undertake more policy work, begin and end their careers in higher status roles and experience greater career progression than women. We find evidence that this negatively impacts women’s representation and their later career paths into parliament.

Mixed-member electoral systems, best loser rules, and the descriptive representation of women

Proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are commonly considered more advantageous for the election of women compared to majoritarian electoral systems. In mixed electoral systems, female candidates are often more likely to be elected through the PR tier compared to women running in single-member district races. While most mixed systems employ a closed-list, a number of legislatures use a best loser provision whereby losing district candidates are ordered on the PR list based on their performance in single-member districts. This paper examines the extent to which best loser laws impact the election of women using candidate data from sub-national legislatures in Mexico and Germany and Japan's House of Representatives. We find the contamination of PR lists by single-member district results reduces the advantage women candidates have in the PR tier. Best loser limits the ability of political parties to use PR to represent groups underrepresented in single-member district elections.

Exploring the Descriptive Representation of Women: The Case of the National Assembly of Wales

With the devolved institutions nearing their 20th anniversary, the Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly have changed the face of politics within the United Kingdom. The National Assembly for Wales, in particular, has made extensive advances in the field of female representation, notably being the first devolved legislature to achieve perfect gender parity. However, the question remains as to whether this parity was achieved through luck or design. This dissertation draws on the work of Pitkin to identify the importance of the relationship between both substantive and descriptive representation and then explores the concepts and contemporary academia to identify the leading theories within this field. The National Assembly will then be analysed in order to establish the measures that have been put in place by the institution in order to protect and promote a commitment to the equality of representation. Four political parties within the National Assembly for Wales will be assessed including the Welsh Labour Party, Welsh Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Conservatives drawing on evidence from 1999–2016. Both chapters will draw upon semi-structured interviews conducted with the Diversity and Inclusion Team and female Assembly Members from across political parties in order to allow for conclusions to be drawn as to what the most influential factors have been in the success of the National Assembly’s female representation, and whether the Assembly has been successful due to luck or design.

Improving Women's Substantive Representation in Community Government: Evidence from Chinese Villages

ABSTRACTThe premise that increasing the number of women in government improves the representation of women's views and needs continues to motivate efforts in developing countries to raise the proportion of women in political office by means of gender‐differentiating ideologies and gender‐affirmative actions. This article raises the concern that a focus on boosting women's descriptive representation distracts attention from other interventions that potentially might be more effective in improving women's substantive representation. The article theoretically compares factors that have the potential to affect the two dimensions of representation, and empirically investigates which of these are conducive to women's substantive representation in community government. Based on case studies of villages in one rich and one poor province of China, the authors conclude that higher democratic quality, combined with stronger financial resources and institutions, produce greater improvements in women's substantive representation than gender ideologies and affirmative actions. This finding challenges the strategies used by development agencies, and identifies factors with the potential to improve women's representation in government, even in one‐party states.

The Politics of Death: The Effect of Women's Descriptive Representation on Mortality

Although many studies have found that female legislators pursue policies important to women, we know relatively little concerning the effect of women’s descriptive representation (WDR) on women’s quality of life. We address this question by examining the relationship between the election of women state legislators and public health. Specifically, we estimate the effect of WDR on premature death rates from 1981-2010, utilizing an error correction model and a novel instrumental variable approach to mitigate endogeneity. We find that WDR serves to improve the well-being of both women and men. However, the effect of WDR is significantly stronger for women (compared to men) in states that play a larger role in the provision of healthcare. Overall, our results suggest that policy remedies aimed at improving the severe underrepresentation of women in government may help improve the relatively low ranking of the United States on indicators of public health.

How to Elect More Women: Gender and Candidate Success in a Field Experiment

AbstractWomen are dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies, and most scholars agree that the greatest limiting factor is the lack of female candidates (supply). However, voters’ subconscious biases (demand) may also play a role, particularly among conservatives. We designed an original field experiment to test whether messages from party leaders can affect women's electoral success. The experimental treatments involved messages from a state Republican Party chair to the leaders of 1,842 precinct‐level caucus meetings. We find that party leaders’ efforts to stoke both supply and demand (and especially both together) increase the number of women elected as delegates to the statewide nominating convention. We replicate this finding in a survey experiment with a national sample of validated Republican primary election voters (N = 2,897). Our results suggest that simple interventions from party leaders can affect the behavior of candidates and voters and ultimately lead to a substantial increase in women's descriptive representation.

Exploring sex differences in attitudes towards the descriptive and substantive representation of women

This article unpacks the rationales that might be behind individual-level support for the idea that there ought to be more women present in political institutions. We outline two distinct rationales: the substantive position that sees an increase in women’s descriptive representation as important in bringing about a subsequent improvement in women’s substantive representation, or the justice-plus position that sees an increase in the descriptive representation of women as important for reasons of justice or other symbolic benefits. We find that women are more likely than men to support an increase in descriptive representation and that women are more likely to hold both the view that an increase in descriptive representation was desirable and that such an increase would improve the representation of women’s political interests. Men are found to be more likely to support an increase in descriptive representation but not relate descriptive representation to substantive representation in any way: the justice-plus rationale.

The Cosmopolitan Future: A Feminist Approach

This study questions the “clash of civilizations” thesis. Referring to the cosmopolitanization process as defined by Beck and Sznaider (2010), I analyze the cosmopolitanization of feminism, that is, the gradual recognition of “the others’ others”, the women, through the evolution of their political rights—the right to elect and be elected—at a global level. In this context, the descriptive representation of women, their substantive representation, and their voices within civil society in the North and the South highlight the fact that feminism is undergoing a process of cosmopolitanization, albeit in a slow and sporadic way. I present this argument from a postcolonial feminist perspective and base my research on NGOs’ data and on data provided by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN-Women. First, I analyze the cosmpolitanization process as applied to feminism. Then, following Beck and Sznaider (2010), I describe how this process is articulated ‘from above’ (top-down cosmopolitanization), referring to electoral data from around the world and to international law. Further, I relate to the cosmopolitanization of feminism ‘from below’, referring to feminist theories, cyberfeminism and the global civil/feminist society. In conclusion, I discuss the common future of feminism and cosmopolitanism.

Voting for Women in Belgium's Flexible List System

Proportional electoral systems tend to be more beneficial for women's descriptive representation than majority systems. However, within proportional systems the gender equality of election outcomes differs, highlighting the importance of studying the actual use of electoral provisions in proportional representation (PR) systems. Therefore, we investigate the determinants of voting for female candidates in Belgium's local elections. This case is particularly interesting given the equal number of men and women on the candidate lists due to quota regulations, the possibility to cast multiple preference votes (lowering competition), and the high visibility of these local elections and its candidates. At the individual level, we find that women are more likely than men to vote for several women, yet same-sex voting is more common among men. Politically sophisticated respondents vote more often for candidates of both sexes. Against our expectations, a left-wing orientation does not increase the likelihood of voting for women. At the electoral district level, a larger supply of women at the top list position increases the chance to vote for this top woman, but there is no spillover effect to women lower on the list. District magnitude affects the number of preference votes but, against expectations, not the likelihood of voting for women.

¿Hacia una democracia paritaria en América Latina? Estrategias fallidas y esperanzas vacías

The construction of parity democracy requires the recognition of rights of all people, regardless of gender. This recognition, in turn, implies the guarantee of full capacity to exercise those rights. Literature and political discourse have argued that the route to equality and parity democracy goes through politics and elections, and that the increase in political representation of women sooner or later will lead us to a real change in their situation and to implementation of public policies with a gender perspective. Many countries, including all the countries in the region, supported gender quotas as an effective and fast-track mechanism to achieve descriptive representation of women. However, after more than twenty five years of affirmative action, the reality of the region denies that idea. Parity democracy is not being achieved through the electoral route. At least, not exclusively via quotas.

A New Way of Doing Politics? Cross-Party Women's Caucuses as Critical Actors in Uganda and Uruguay

Many parliaments now include specialised bodies to further women's interests in the legislative process. In this article, we compare cross-party women's caucuses in two non-Western countries—Uganda and Uruguay—which, despite very different levels of women's descriptive representation, spurred public debate on women's issues and made significant legislative gains. We explore how female legislators in these two cases collectively were able to carve out institutional space in male-dominated contexts and successfully establish themselves as critical actors for the substantive representation of women. Both women's caucuses facilitated networking and collaboration among female parliamentarians from different parties and between legislators and the women's movement, as well as building strategic alliances with male colleagues.

Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment—a 50–50 quota imposed by the national board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on 290 municipal branches—to examine quotas’ influence on women's selection to, and survival in, top political posts. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became more likely to select (but not reappoint) female leaders. Extending this analysis, we show that the quota increased the number of women perceived as qualified for these positions. Our findings support the notion that quotas can have an acceleration effect on women's representation in leadership positions, particularly when they augment the pool of female candidates for these posts. These results help dispel the myth that quotas trade short-term gains in women's descriptive representation for long-term exclusion from political power.

Who stands in the way of women? Open vs. closed lists and candidate gender in Estonia

The literature on women's descriptive representation has looked at the debate on open and closed lists as a choice between electoral systems. This article instead focuses on whether voters or the parties are biased against female candidates. Using data from six Estonian elections, the article finds that voters are not consistently biased against female candidates and open lists do not necessarily decrease women's representation. However, unknown and non-incumbent female candidates fare significantly worse than similar men. The analysis also shows that parties do not place women in electable positions on closed lists, and closed lists do not improve women's representation.

Conservatism, feminisation and the representation of women in UK politics

The Feminization of the Conservative party was one of the most visible leitmotifs of Cameron’s modernization strategy in the period 2005–2010. In this article we assess the extent to which the party, while in coalition with the Liberal Democrats from 2010–2015, delivered on its pre-2010 commitments for women. We consider two dimensions of feminizing politics; the descriptive representation of women within the Conservative party in the House and in Government, and the substantive representation of women’s interests in the form of policy programmes and legislation. In respect of descriptive representation we find that the Conservative party has faltered since 2010: refusing to use quotas and even dropping the 2010 ‘A list’ equality promotion strategy. Turning to the substantive representation of women it is clear that the Conservative party has instituted an array between these inclinations, although there is a tension between the party’s liberal inclinations and its continued emphasis on the value of the traditional family. A more radical critique is levelled at the party’s commitment to financial austerity and the disproportionate effect this has had on women; the question as to whether women are viewed as the target of spending cuts or collateral damage depends on whether one employs an economically liberal or more leftist definition of feminization.

Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Poor Citizens in Switzerland

Over the past decade, a large number of studies have shown that in advanced democracies policymakers are more likely to represent the preferences of high-income citizens than the preferences of low-income citizens. In a quest to understand this income bias in substantive representation, several authors have recently suggested that the persistent descriptive underrepresentation of low-income groups in policymaking institutions may explain why political decisions so frequently are skewed toward the preferences of the affluent. However, although this is a plausible explanation, many previous studies dealing with the consequences of descriptive representation have failed to find an effect of policymakers’ incomes or social class backgrounds on their behavior in office. In this essay, we argue that descriptive representation may indeed have an effect on policymaking, yet for it to be consequential three necessary conditions must be satisfied.