Gendering Gamson’s Law

• In Event: Women, Gender and Cabinet Ministers in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Gamson’s Law is “one of the strongest empirical relationships documented in the social sciences” (Warwick and Druckman 2006, 635). The law was demonstrated by Browne and Franklin (1973) and has been confirmed by subsequent studies. It identifies a strong correlation, across parliamentary systems, between the proportion of legislative seats a party contributes to a governing coalition and the proportion of portfolios the party receives in the cabinet. This paper transposes the idea of “seat share/portfolio share proportionality” from studies of the partisan composition of cabinets to studies of the gender composition of cabinets. It attempts to gender Gamson’s Law. It investigates whether the gender composition of governing parties’ parliamentary delegations affects the gender composition of the cabinets those parties construct. Does a coalition whose MP delegation contains 35% women produce a cabinet that contains 35% women? While such a determination seems straightforward, restrictions in cross-national time series data have made it difficult to test comparatively. The IPU provides information on the total numbers of women and men in the world’s legislatures. But no cross-national dataset provides information about the number of men or women that each parliamentary party contributes to the parliamentary aggregate. This paper relies, therefore, on a new dataset covering 19 OECD parliamentary systems from the early 1990s through 2018. After establishing theoretical foundations, the paper outlines descriptive trends and pushes toward explanation of variation. Are there systematic differences in the extent to which governments obey a gendered Gamson’s logic? Do countries become more “Gamson compliant” as time progresses? Do parties’ ideologies and/or levels of bargaining power explain variation in cabinets’ Gamson compliance? The paper concludes by proposing “Gamson’s threshold” as a normative lower bound for acceptable levels of women’s cabinet representation.

Authors

• Melinda J. Adams, James Madison University

• Katherine Hayes

• John A. Scherpereel, James Madison University