From Thin to Thick Representation: How a Female President Shapes Female Parliamentary Behavior

Abstract

How does the symbolic power of a female president affect female parliamentary behavior? Whereas female descriptive representation has increased around the world, women parliamentarians still face significant discrimination and stereotyping, inhibiting their ability to have a real voice and offer “thick” representation to women voters. We leverage the case of Malawi, a case where the presidency changed hands from a man to a woman through a truly exogenous shock, to study the effect of a female president on female parliamentary behavior. Drawing on unique parliamentary transcripts data, we argue and show that women MPs under a female president become empowered and less confined to stereotypical gendered issue-ownership patterns, leading to a significant increase in female MP speech making. Our results directly address theories of symbolic representation by focusing particularly on intraelite role-model effects.

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“…Following the procedure discussed in Wahman et al (2021), we employed transfer learning on BERT (Devlin et al 2018), a pretrained neural network made available by Google. We used hand‐coded bills from Nigeria to retrain the network for the specific task of interest and then validated it using hand‐coded laws from Ghana and bills from Zimbabwe.…”

A Trailblazer or a Barrier? Dynastic Politics and Symbolic Representation of the First Female President of South Korea, Park Geun-hye

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