The Causes and Consequences of Women’s Representation

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Women’s representation – in legislatures, governments or among office holders at large – has over the past decades increased across most of the globe. Yet, women are still underrepresented. What are the driving forces of these developments? And how do they matter for politics? This panel departs from and seeks to address these two overall questions.

The literature on what explains varying levels of female representation and how this affects politics has made great progress over the years. There is, to begin with, systematic evidence showing that both supply of women that are willing and able to stand for office, and demand for female candidates, are key explanatory factors (Norris & Lovenduski 1995). In terms of the demand side, institutional attributes such as intra-party candidate nomination practices (Matland & Strudlar 1996), the electoral system (Krook 2018, for an overview), as well as gender quotas (O´Brien & Rickne 2018), have been evidenced as important determinants of women’s representation. In terms of consequences, a large literature has also documented the importance of gender for descriptive, symbolic as well as substantive representation. For example, we know that female representation matters for political engagement and democratic legitimacy among ordinary citizens. In terms of policy making, there are also clear effects on legislation addressing women’s rights (Franceschet et al 2012), public health and poverty alleviation (Clayton and Zetterberg 2018), as well as literatures documenting how increasing the female share of representatives reduces political corruption (Bauhr et al 2019).

This panel aims to make two contributions to this literature. First, the papers provide new and original evidence for both explanatory causal mechanisms underlying women’s representation (or the lack thereof), as well as how this matter for policy making. The first paper looks at the impact of size of the electorate conjoint with assembly size, two features that have been studied before but with inconclusive evidence. The second paper looks at the voter-demand side of the equation, uncovering the interplay between partisan preferences and voters’ relative prioritization of candidates’ gender. The third and fourth papers turn to another underexplored mechanism underlying gender inequality: discrimination in the structure of promotions. In the third paper, this pertains to electoral lists, in the fourth to the local public administration. The fifth paper, finally, turns to the consequences of women’s representation by exploring spending priorities between general welfare (education) and community security (the police).

Second, the papers of this panel make a methodological contribution by relying on detailed, disaggregated data and strong claims for causal identification. While there are an increasing number of exceptions, the vast majority of evidence on the causes and consequences of women’s representation has so far been correlational and broadly cross-sectional. We address this concern in two ways. First, we draw on exogenous variation in institutional reforms to more precisely identify causal effects. Geographically, our papers cover Sweden, Norway, Ireland and Italy. Second, we rely on detailed, disaggregated high-quality register data. Our belief is that this analytical preference of internal over external validity is much needed at the stage in which the literature on women’s representation is currently in.

Bauhr, M., Charron, N., & Wängnerud, L. (2019). Exclusion or interests? Why females in elected office reduce petty and grand corruption. European Journal of Political Research, 58(4), 1043-1065.

Clayton, A., & Zetterberg, P. (2018). Quota shocks: Electoral gender quotas and government spending priorities worldwide. The Journal of Politics, 80(3), 916-932.

Franceschet, S., Krook, M. L., & Piscopo, J. M. (2012). Conceptualizing the impact of gender quotas. The impact of gender quotas, 3-26.

Krook, M. L. (2018). Electoral systems and women’s representation. The Oxford handbook of electoral systems, 175-192.

Matland, R. E., & Studlar, D. T. (1996). The contagion of women candidates in single-member district and proportional representation electoral systems: Canada and Norway. The journal of politics, 58(3), 707-733.

Norris, P., & Lovenduski, J. (1995). Political recruitment: Gender, race and class in the British Parliament. Cambridge University Press.

O’Brien, D. Z., & Rickne, J. (2016). Gender quotas and women's political leadership. American Political Science Review, 110(1), 112-126.

Sub Unit

• Division 14: Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Democracies

Cosponsors

• Division 31: Women and Politics Research

• Division 34: Representation and Electoral Systems

Individual Presentations

• Partisan and Gender Considerations in Determining Vote Choice: The Irish Case - Sinéad C. M. Harrington, Trinity College Dublin

• Gender Gaps in Political Seniority Systems - Ali Cirone, London School of Economics; Gary W. Cox, Stanford University; Jon H. Fiva, Norwegian Business School; Daniel M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania; Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University

• Man Up! The Glass Escalator in Sweden’s Local Government Bureaucracy - Nora Anter, Uppsala University

• Welfare Spending and Women's Political Preferences: Evidence from Italy - Emanuel Coman, Trinity College Dublin; Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, University of York

Chair

• Jan Teorell Stockholm University

Discussant

• Amanda Clayton UC Berkeley