(iPoster) Does Women’s Leadership Enhance Legislative Civility?

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Legislative Studies & Authoritarian Demands, Compliance, and the Politics of Protest
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Legislative Studies

Abstract

Does descriptive representation of women improve the quality of legislative deliberation? Increasing partisan animosity has fueled aggressive and uncivil rhetoric among lawmakers, substantially undermining both the quality of legislative deliberation and productivity. Research in gender and politics has shown that women legislators consistently demonstrate more cooperative and consensus-oriented approaches compared to their male counterparts, who are more conflictual and ideological. Studies further demonstrate that higher proportions of women on committees decrease interruptions and conversational dominance by modifying the patterns of group interactions. Building on these insights, we theorize that greater descriptive representation of women, particularly in leadership positions, will foster more civil legislative deliberation. Given committee chairs' agenda-setting power and influence over group norms, we hypothesize that leadership gender composition shapes the tone and civility of legislative discourse. We test our theoretical expectation using a comprehensive speech dataset from standing committee meetings in the South Korean National Assembly across four legislative terms (2004–2020). Using a fine-tuned Korean-language deep learning classifier (KoELECTRA) to measure aggressive speech, we find that women committee chairs substantially reduce aggression levels in legislative discourse during committee meetings. This result demonstrates the strong influence of gender composition in institutional authority on legislative deliberation. Our study contributes to legislative studies and gender and politics research by highlighting the critical role of women’s leadership in establishing deliberative norms in legislatures, and by demonstrating the utility of deep learning methods for analyzing large-scale parliamentary speech data.

Authors

• Eunmi Cho, Yonsei University

• Jeong Hyun Kim, Yonsei University

• Sinjae Kang, Yonsei University