Westminster Women: The Politics of Presence

Abstract

The entry of the 1997 cohort of Labour women into public life offers a test case of whether, and under what conditions, women politicians have the capacity to ‘make a substantive difference’. We outlines the theory of the politics of presence and discuss how to operationalise this in a testable model. We, use the British Representation Study survey of 1,000 national politicians (including parliamentary candidates and elected Members of Parliament) conducted in the 2001 general election. The analysis centres on the impact of gender on five scales measuring attitudes and values on issues that commonly divide British party politics. Once we control for party, there are no significant differences among women and men politicians across the value scales concerning the free market economy, Europe, and moral traditionalism. Yet on the values most directly related to women's interests – namely the affirmative action and the gender equality scales – women and men politicians differ significantly within each party, even after controlling for other common social background variables that explain attitudes, such as their age, education, and income. The conclusion considers why these findings matter for the composition of parliament, the public policy agenda and for women's roles as political leaders.

Do Women Represent Women in France? The Case of Brittany's Regional Council

“…In Brittany, it is the regional council's president, aided by a cabinet of vice presidents and policy commissioners (instead of individual legislators), who sets the policy agenda and drafts the budget, which are then approved or rejected when the council meets in its tri-monthly plenary session. Moreover, given that the president leads the council's majority party (or coalition of parties), roll call votes do not provide an accurate measure of a councilor's preference since officeholders tend to vote along party lines (Lovenduski and Norris, 2003) or, as we shall see below, to vote unanimously in favor of the executive's proposals. Thus, when tabulating women-friendly policies, I focused on which members of the executive submitted the policy to the council for its approval.…”

Gendered economic policy making: the case of public expenditures on family allowances

“…A more recent work on Swedish municipalities by Svaleryd (2009) has found a positive impact of the female political participation on public spending towards education and childcare. Similarly Lovenduski and Norris (2003), using a survey from 2001 British Representation Study of 1,000 national politicians, have emphasized on the sex differences of legislators in policy making related to women's issues. One of the other applications to this line of models has been done by Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) who have carried on a survey for all investments in local public goods in sample villages of two districts in India.…”

¿Qué sabemos sobre la presencia política de las mujeres y la toma de decisiones? Claves para un marco de análisis.

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