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Do men and women legislators have equal opportunities to carry out their parliamentary duties? An important first step to uncover the parliament's inner life is to evaluate MPs' experiences of their work environment. In this article, we explore the Swedish parliament where women have held over 40 percent of the seats for two decades to test the persistence of gendered norms and practices. Using an originally-collected survey dataset of 279 Swedish MPs (82 percent response rate), we find that women MPs experience greater pressure, higher levels of anxiety, and are subject to more negative treatment than men MPs. Yet, while men and women report participating in the debate and influencing their political party's agenda to the same degree, we conclude that the Parliament's working environment remains gendered in that women pay a higher personal cost for their political engagement.

This introduction to the Special Section ‘Parliaments as workplaces: gendered approaches to the study of legislatures’ makes the case for revisiting the conditions under which male and female Members of Parliament (MPs) and staff carry out their parliamentary duties, thereby furthering the understanding of parliaments’ inner workings. It shows that adopting a workplace perspective grounded on feminist institutionalist analyses and gender organisational studies opens up new avenues for studying parliaments and the outcomes of political representation. The article then outlines how contributors to this Special Section deal with various aspects of the parliamentary workplace and concludes by highlighting the wider implications of this perspective for examining crucial questions of the parliamentary studies research agenda.

Women’s political representation has increased rapidly in the past few decades, but significant barriers continue to circumscribe women’s political participation in a myriad of ways. Previous research has indicated that online abuse constitutes one such obstacle. Yet, only a small number of studies have systematically examined and compared the experiences of online abuse of men and women politicians. We argue that it is not enough to merely state that online abuse is gendered if we wish to understand and tackle such abuse: it is essential to know how it is gendered. In this article we conceptualize gendered online abuse in terms of three dimensions—frequency, character, and consequences—so that we can provide a more comprehensive empirical understanding of its prevalence. Using original survey data and interviews with a large number of Swedish MPs, we demonstrate the merit of unpacking the concept of such abuse in respect to different analytical dimensions. We find all three dimensions to be gendered in the Swedish context but in different and sometimes unexpected ways. Although women do not experience a higher frequency of online abuse than men, the character of the abuse is gendered insofar as women MPs are subjected to more sexualized and gendered harassment. We also find that men exposed to high levels of online abuse seem slightly more inclined to leave politics, whereas women report that they feel that their personal agency is circumscribed to a greater extent.

Sweden is well-known as the first country in the world to adopt client criminalization in the effort to control and eventually eliminate prostitution. Less known and discussed is the emergence of extensive collaborative governance arrangements that serve as complements to the legal framework. The aim of this article is to provide new knowledge as it investigates the multifaceted ways in which governance arrangements have developed in Sweden, employing collaborative governance theories and the Regulatory-Intermediaries-Target (RIT) model for this purpose. Also explored are the strategies of responsibilization directed towards target groups that have been utilized in implementing policies to control prostitution and trafficking. The article analyzes not only the rationale behind the adoption of collaborative governance in Sweden, but also the complex governance practices, in which a range of actors are involved in policy making and application as well as regulation, that have emerged in this regard. We conclude that the previous understanding of the Swedish model needs to be revised, and that although collaborative governance has made a fruitful contribution to the field in question, it also introduces new types of problems, particularly a significant increase in informality and decision-making outside the legal framework, primarily by civil society actors.