Although there are considerably more men than women in most parliaments around the world, we know little about whether male-dominated legislatures neglect women’s policy preferences. Our article addresses this gap by analysing the congruence of policy preferences between women, men and their elected representatives. We endeavour to answer two questions. Are women’s policy preferences underrepresented in modern democracies? If so, which factors explain the size of the gender gaps in policy preference congruence? Comparing 21 European countries, we show that women’s preferences actually tend to be more accurately represented in parliaments than those of men. Moreover, our analyses reveal that this unanticipated finding is not driven by the share of female office-holders, but rather by levels of women’s turnout, which leads us to conclude that who votes is more important than who represents for policy preference congruence.

Although the majority of studies on political knowledge document lingering gender-based differences in advanced industrial democracies, most contributors have drawn such conclusions from a single or a handful of countries, using limited batteries of political information items. Exploiting a pooled data set of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems encompassing 106 post-election surveys in forty-seven countries between 1996 and 2011, this article demonstrates that survey instrument–related factors, such as question format and content, as well as the overall difficulty of questions, are more consequential in shaping the size of gender gaps in political knowledge than institutional factors, such as electoral rules or opportunity structures. The research design of this article draws from almost three hundred different items measuring factual political knowledge using the broadest country coverage and most comprehensive approach to measurement to date.

The European Parliament (EP) has one of the highest proportions of women in its ranks, with over a third in 2009. Although previous research has pointed to the use of proportional representation (PR) in European elections as 'friendlier' to women, few have looked at differences in the types of PR rules in use in each country. In this article, we argue that the conventional wisdom according to which institutional design-the choice of electoral rules-should shape the composition of the EP does not hold, and suggest that the well-documented empirical connection between electoral rules and descriptive representation might in fact be an endogenous rather than a causal relationship.

Previous research has shown that voters’ perception of electoral fairness has an impact on their attitudes and behaviors. However, less research has attempted to link objective measurements of electoral integrity on voters’ attitudes about the democratic process. Drawing on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Quality of Elections Data, we investigate whether cross-national differences in electoral integrity have significant influences on citizens’ level of satisfaction with democracy. We hypothesize that higher levels of observed electoral fraud will have a negative impact on evaluations of the democratic process, and that this effect will be mediated by a respondent’s status as a winner or loser of an election. The article’s main finding is that high levels of electoral fraud are indeed linked to less satisfaction with democracy. However, we show that winning only matters in elections that are conducted in an impartial way. The moment elections start to display the telltale signs of manipulation and malpractice, winning and losing no longer have different effects on voter’s levels of satisfaction with democracy.

Drawing on an original dataset covering more than 100 political parties in over 20 European Union Member States, this article analyses how political recruitment procedures affect the proportion of women nominated on party lists in the context of the 2009 European Parliament elections. The findings show that the inclusiveness of the selectorates in the early stage of candidate selection processes is a key determinant of the representativeness of lists regarding their gender composition. Moreover, it is found that neither territorial centralisation nor the inclusiveness of the selectorate in the later stage of candidate selection play a significant role. The key to the puzzle, therefore, lies in the composition of the initial pool of potential candidates and those who make initial nominations.