Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) [442430596]

October 2020-September 2024

The share of women in parliaments worldwide increased in the last decades. Extensive research studies the newly elected female representatives and indicates that they change the parliamentary agenda by promoting women’s interest in policy areas such as heath, family, or gender equality policies. Comparably little is known about the reactions of men office-holders to the changing gender composition of legislatures.

The objective of this project is to close this research gap and focus on the group of representatives who still occupy the majority of legislative seats. Based on the “politics of presence” argument (Phillips 1998) one might argue that men legislators learn about women’s interests as more womenlegislators enter parliaments and, eventually, begin to promote these issues themselves.

This and similar hypotheses were be put under scrutiny during the project based on empirical evidence from the sixteen German states between 1990 and today. Focusing on one country ensures a comparable political setting in particular concerning the tools representatives have at hand to promote women’s interests. At the same time, the sample constitutes a micro cosmos of Western developed democracies with considerable variation in the shares of women elected, but also other variables of interest such as the electoral system or postmaterialist and feminist values in the society. During the project, we gathered extensive data covering three indicators for women’s substantive representation.

The resulting analyses, first of all, provide new and innovative insights into the relationship between gender and legislative behavior. Beyond, the findings provide much needed explanations for the growing empirical evidence that increasing presence of women in parliaments is not correlated with a more accurate reflection of women’s preferences by political parties, parliaments, and in the legislation.

Related publications:

Kroeber, Corinna (2024) “Gendered patterns of committee assignments – To what extent are women in parliamentary party groups game changers?”, Parliamentary Affairs, 77(3): 623-643, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsad011.

Kroeber, Corinna (2023) “When do men MPs claim to represent women in plenary debates – Time-series cross-sectional evidence from the German states”, Political Research Quarterly, 72(2): 1024-1037. https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221119199.