Sweden

The Swedish Riksdag is often regarded as an ideal type for Scandinavian or Nordic parliamentarism. This relates to institutional features and party cohesion, but more often so to descriptive representation in terms of gender—an aspect where Sweden’s parliament has consistently occupied the top position among European parliaments during the last decades. However, and despite an unlikely-case-character, previous research has shown that gender biases exist in Nordic parliaments and the Riksdag in particular. This chapter follows this research and evaluates how gender and seniority determine legislators’ opportunities to speak in plenary debates. Our results show that the gender biases found in previous research persist to date and extend further to the past. Furthermore, low seniority amplifies the effect of gender; junior female legislators have the slimmest chances to speak in plenary debates.

Islamist Parties and Women’s Representation in Morocco

Does electing Islamists help or hurt women? Due to the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) obtaining 13% of seats in the 2002–2007 legislature and the implementation of an electoral gender quota that resulted in thirty-five women winning seats in 2002, Morocco offers a rare opportunity to explore the intersectional impact of parliamentarians’ gender and party affiliation on women’s symbolic and service representation. Using visits to parliamentary offices in Tangiers, a city in northern Morocco, and an original survey of 112 Moroccan Members of Parliament (MPs) conducted in 2008, this chapter finds that responsiveness for female citizens depends on parliamentarians’ party and gender. Female legislators and Islamist deputies (including male Islamists) are also more likely to interact with female citizens than male parliamentarians from non-Islamist parties. It argues that the PJD’s stronger party institutionalization enhances legislators’ incentives to work in mixed-gender teams, leading to more frequent legislator interactions with female citizens. By offering novel evidence that developing a strong party system—in addition to electing women—is crucial for improving women’s representation in clientelistic settings, the results extend the literature on Islam, gender, and governance and offer insights into Islamist electoral success in clientelistic settings.

Marginalization and Mobilization: The Roots of Female Legislators’ Collaborative Advantage in the States

Scholars have argued that female legislators are more prone to collaborate than their male counterparts. Though collaboration may be more or less evident in particular situations, we seek to more clearly establish the mechanism behind women’s collaborative activity using the framework of marginalization. In this paper, we use cosponsorship data from 74 state legislative chambers from 2011–2014 to analyze collaborative patterns and mobilizing institutions. We find female legislators are more collaborative than men, and that their collaborative advantage strengthens in chambers where women are systematically excluded from leadership positions. The advantage also extends to bipartisan collaboration, but only in less polarized settings with women’s caucuses. Furthermore, our findings imply that as women are integrated into leadership collaboration will actually decline, especially within their own party. We believe these results are important for understanding both the roots of collaborative behavior among female legislators and consequences of chambers that marginalize women from leadership positions.

Electoral Incentives, Critical Actors, and the Substantive Representation of Women in Parliament

When and how does the susbstantive representation of women in parliament occur? This dissertation makes two main contributions in this regard. First, it analyzes when female MPs represent women’s interests in parliament. Regarding the ‘when’ and ‘why’ of women’s substantive representation, this dissertation investigates how the institutional environment affects the parliamentary behavior of female MPs and their opportunities to focus on the representation of women’s interests. In particular, it explores the effect of the electoral system and asks whether the electoral incentive structure influences whether and to what extent female legislators represent women-specific issues more frequently than their male colleagues do. Second, this dissertation broadens our understanding of the potential actors in women’s substantive representation and explicitly analyzes whether, when and why male MPs represent women’s interests in parliament. It examines whether the presence of women in parliament has an effect on male MPs’ behavior and their decision to actively represent women’s interests. Moreover, it analyzes whether the electoral vulnerability of male MPs has an effect on their willingness to pay attention to women’s concerns.

Welfare Policy Outcomes

Research shows that Black and Latinx legislators make a difference in the welfare policies states enact. Do women also make a distinctive contribution? Focusing on state welfare reform in the mid-1990s, Chapter 6 weighs the efficacy of two alternative approaches to answering that question. An additive approach, which treats gender and race/ethnicity as mutually exclusive, suggests that female legislators—regardless of race/ethnicity—will mitigate the more restrictive and punitive aspects of welfare reform, much like their Black and Latinx counterparts do. In contrast, an intersectional approach, which emphasizes the interdependence of gender and race/ethnicity, suggests that legislative women of color will have the strongest countervailing effect on state welfare reform—stronger than that of other women or men of color. The analysis demonstrates that an intersectional approach yields a better understanding of race, gender, and representation: legislative women of color have a distinctive impact on welfare policy in the states.

When is Access to Political Capital Gendered? Lessons from the Czech Parliament

This article compares access to bill making and senior legislative offices among male and female MPs when their respective parties are in government or in opposition. Using an original dataset with all Czech MPs elected between 1996 and 2017, the article finds that female legislators face a more restricted access to these important legislative assignments when their party is part of government and when their value as a means of generating political capital is high. This points to the specific conditions under which female MPs might be arbitrarily held back by their parties in the parliamentary workplace.

Do Elites Discriminate against Female Political Aspirants? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Do elites exhibit gender bias when responding to political aspirants? Drawing on theories of gender bias, group attachment, and partisan identity, I conduct the first audit experiment outside the United States to examine the presence of gender bias in the earliest phases of the political recruitment process. Based on responses from 1,774 Canadian legislators, I find evidence of an overall gender bias in favor of female political aspirants. Specifically, legislators are more responsive to female political aspirants and more likely to provide them with helpful advice when they ask how to get involved in politics. This pro-women bias, which exists at all levels of government, is stronger among female legislators and those associated with left-leaning parties. These results suggest that political elites in Canada are open to increasing female political representation and thus should serve as welcome encouragement for women to pursue their political ambitions.

Practicing Accountability, Challenging Gendered State Resistance: Feminist Legislators and Feminicidio in Mexico

In the late 1990s, Mexican feminists mobilized transnationally to demand state accountability for the feminicidios (feminicides) of women in Ciudad Juarez. Feminicidio refers to the misogynous killing of women and the state’s complicity in this violence by tolerating it with impunity. Drawing on debates of the Mexican Federal Congress (1997–2012) and interviews with feminist state and non-state actors, I examine feminist legislators’ response to transnational activism, which was to pass the “General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence” and to create the penal-type code of feminicidio, which includes provisions to punish negligent state actors. These laws make the state a target of its own punitive power. To pass these acts, feminist legislators faced resistance from male legislators and the Federal Executive. I build on feminist institutionalism to theorize this resistance as gendered. Gendered state resistance was pervasive because feminist legislators practiced accountability by identifying the complicity of state institutions, including Congress, in perpetuating feminicidio. As part of the process, they built alliances with other female legislators and framed their arguments with notions of modern statehood. Although this framing strategy resulted in innovative legal change, I interrogate the assumption that modernity is the solution to feminicidio, because it can lead gendered state resistance to manifest as a simulation of accountability.