Parliamentary Politics Polarize Around Gender: The Case of European Parliament

• In Event: Political Resources and Gender

Abstract

A strong tradition of gender and politics research has analyzed the gendered inequalities which shape women’s chances of being elected in political office. Policy measures to help women’s “pathways to power” range from soft measures such as funding to binding ones such as party or legislative quotas (Franceschet et al 2012; Krook 2010). Once in office, women’s political careers, and the quality of their representative work (Dovi 2007; Celis and Childs 2020) are shaped by the gendered practices of parliaments (Erikson and Verge 2020). Feminist research has discerned a range of gendered inequalities from masculine political culture limiting women’s parliamentary speech to gender differences in sponsoring bills; from difficulties to combine political work with care duties to outright sexual harassment. Paralleling the quota debate, an emerging strand of research explores “gender sensitizing parliaments” – the soft and hard gender equality measures taken by parliaments to eradicate gendered inequalities of parliamentary work (Childs 2016).

The proposed paper advances these key gender and politics debates by focusing on parliamentary political parties. The first contribution of the proposed paper is to build a framework of analyzing parliamentary parties by combining the focus on gendered inequalities within the political parties with their gender equality measures and practices. Drawing on extant literature the proposed paper develops a model of a continuum of “gendered inequalities” ranging from discrimination, harassment to more subtle issues and indirect inequalities. This dimension is compared and contrasted with a another one: that of “gender equality practices”, also presented as a continuum ranging from soft to hard measures.

A focus on parliamentary political parties enables an analysis of politicization and politics around gender equality and their impact on gendered political work within parliaments. To illustrate the benefits of this, the proposed paper analyses the case of the European Parliament. The European Parliament makes it possible to study a wide range of political parties and political groups which each have very different approaches to gender, equalities and women’s rights. Currently, the European Union’s 27 member states’ political parties have formed seven political groups within the parliament: including the conservative, social democrat and liberal groups respectively, the Greens/EFA and far left, as well as, most recently, the radical right populist groups. This gives an exciting and unique coverage of European political parties, their distinct gender regimes and approaches to gender and equality and gives an opportunity to study the interaction between the gendered inequalities and gender equality practices and their significance in parliamentary contexts.

The proposed paper will draw on a large qualitative dataset of 130 interviews with Members of the European Parliament and political staff conducted in 2018-2021. The interviews cover all political groups, and form a representative sample of countries and genders. The findings place the political groups along a continuum of the axes of gendered inequalities and gender equality practices, comparing and contrasting their effects. The analysis shows a group of excellent performers (greens, far left), which set high standards for gender equalities within the parliament; good performers (social democrats, liberals), which illustrate good intentions but persistent gendered inequalities; contradictory performers (conservative, right populist) and poor performers (far right), which respectively explain why gender equality fails to be achieved in the parliament, and has, instead turned into a polarizing issue.

References:
Dovi, Susanne. 2007. The Good Representative. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Celis, Karen and Childs, Sarah. 2020. Feminist Democratic Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Childs, Sarah. 2016. The Good Parliament Report. Available online.
Erikson, Josefina and Tania Verge. 2020. “Gender, Power and Privilege in the Parliamentary Workplace”. Parliamentary Affairs. Online First.
Franceschet, Susan, Mona Lena Krook, and Jennifer M. Piscopo, eds. 2012. The Impact of Gender Quotas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Krook, Mona Lena. 2010. “Beyond Supply and Demand: A Feminist-Institutionalist Theory of Candidate Selection.” Political Research Quarterly 63 (4): 707-720.

Author

• Johanna Kantola, Tampere University