Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: When Women Matter: Exploring Theoretical Links Between Women Descriptive and Substantive Representation

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Since 1995, over 40 countries have adopted legislation that mandates women's participation in government, and these policies enjoy considerable support from international organizations, politicians, and activists. Practitioners who seek to increase women's presence in office do so in large part because they believe it will provide normative benefits for women through improved policy representation. Despite this widely held assumption, it is clear that in a number of cases increasing women's representation fails to transform the legislative agenda. While in some countries women's increased participation alters policy representation-defined in this project as the adoption of legislation related to women's interests-in others the addition of female legislators has had only limited consequences. Why does increasing women's participation lead to such mixed results? This project represents one of the first systematic efforts to carefully develop and test theoretical expectations concerning when and why increasing women's presence in national assemblies leads to greater attention to women's issues. A series of empirical implications are developed that can be used to assess the correlations (or lack thereof) that are often found between women's presence in legislative assemblies and instance of women's policy representation. These observable implications are used to establish when increases in women's presence in office cause policy adoption. The research design combines a cross-national statistical analysis on the adoption of legislation related to women's issues with a qualitative case study of women's representation in the Labour Party of Great Britain. Given the attention and resources that have been dedicated to increasing the number of women in national assemblies, elucidating the relationship between women's presence in office and legislative attention to women's issues is a timely project with obvious policy implications. By illustrating that not all institutional settings facilitate the link between women's participation and representation, it helps to explain instances where female legislators fail to transform the legislative agenda. For policy actors committed to increasing attention to women's issues, the theoretical framework also provides criteria for identifying cases in which women's greater participation may secure their policy representation. Thus, in challenging the presumed link between the presence of female representation and attention to women's interests, the project provides a more nuanced interpretation as to whether increasing the number of women in office "matters" for legislative outcomes.