Do parliaments underrepresent women’s policy preferences? Exploring gender equality in policy congruence in 21 European democracies

Abstract

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.

Gender and opinion–policy congruence in Europe

“…Instead, women tended to be more supportive of libertarian and pro-environmental policies (cf. Dingler et al 2018).…”

“…Lax and Phillips 2012;Monroe 1998;Page and Shapiro 1983). In the context of gender, a recent study by Dingler, Kroeber and Fortin-Rittberger (2018) investigates whether inequalities exist in the congruence between public opinion and the positions of parliaments around Europe, measured by expert placements of parties on seven policy dimensions. Interestingly, they find that women's views are overall better represented than men's.…”

A Gender Gap in Party Congruence and Responsiveness?

“…In addition, I identified a similar effect with respect to party responsiveness to female and male supporters. These results are important because the few studies of congruence and responsiveness that have considered this relationship between the descriptive and substantive representation of women did not find any effect (Dingler, Kroeber, and Fortin-Rittberger 2018;Homola 2017). One reason for this difference is that I directly examined the presence of elected women in parties, whereas previous studies examined instead the effect of the proportion of women elected in legislature, therefore masking some heterogeneity in the distribution of elected women across parties.…”

How to measure the substantive representation of traditionally excluded groups in comparative research: a literature review and new data

“…This approach stands in the tradition of studies inquiring policy responsiveness of all citizens and scholars also made use of it to study women and the poor (see, e.g., Blais and Bodet [2006]; Giger et al [2012]; Golder and Stramski [2010]; Powell and Vanberg [2000]). With some adaptions, this indicator can be applied to study women's substantive representation as a recent study by Dingler et al (2018) shows. Even though this indicator does not measure action ex-post, it investigates the policy agenda that parties communicate to voters and thus studies credible commitments to promote group interests.…”