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Recent developments in the gender and politics literature suggest that studying the substantive representation of women is much more complicated than counting the number of women present in a particular political institution and judging the actions of women representatives against a 'feminist' shopping list of demands. In brief, the substantive representation of women is no longer considered to be restricted to what happens in our parliaments or only by what women representatives do therein. Furthermore, what constitutes women's issues and interests -that which is to be represented -can also no longer be considered straightforwardly 'out there' to simply be acted upon by representatives; they are constructed as part of the representative process. Acknowledgement of the diversity and likely contested nature of claims to act 'for women' coincides with an emerging appreciation that the claims for women made by conservative representatives need to be brought more explicitly into our analytic frameworks and empirical studies. Together, these points not only undermine any assumption that the substantive representation of women equals the feminist substantive representation of women; they also raise the possibility of non-and anti-feminist representative claims and actions 'for' women. Against this backdrop, we review recent developments within the sub-field of the substantive representation of women literature and offer some reflections and suggestions about how to take conservatism seriously when studying the substantive representation of women both conceptually and empirically.

Based on empirical data, speeches from the budget debates of the Belgian Lower House , this article explores the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women. The article concludes that women members of Parliament (MPs) were women's most fervent representatives and contributed in a unique way to how women were represented; they stretched the borders of the political definition of women's interests and made them fit better with the way women themselves defined their interests. The research contributes to the development of the concepts "substantive representation" and "women's interests" and of the methodology of empirical research in this field.The gendered impact of the presence of women in politics is one of the main foci of the growing body of research on sex, gender, and politics (Childs and Krook 2006;Mackay 2004). The questions "Do women in

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A recent wave of gender and politics research revisits the concept of “women's interests,” opening up new ways of thinking about who can articulate these interests and how to avoid essentialism in empirical analysis on women's substantive representation. This article seeks to advance these debates by integrating them with new work on political theory noting that speaking “for” a group also entails speaking “about” a group. Resolving some of the tensions presenting in existing work, the revised approach expands the range of actors engaged in making claims on behalf of “women” and draws a conceptual distinction between “issues,” broad policy categories, and “interests,” the content given to a particular issue. The contours of this new approach are illustrated via a comparative study of claims-making on behalf of “women” in three countries, revealing some overlaps but also important differences in the issues raised and arguments made regarding the nature of “women's interests.” This inductive method avoids problems of essentialism by arguing that “women” and “women's interests” are constructed through, and not simply reflected in, political advocacy on their behalf.