Are Segmental Parties Bad for Women? Rethinking the Challenges of Representation in Consociational Power-Sharing

ABSTRACT

Consociational power-sharing mandates representation of politically salient groups in government and encourages their participation in decision making. This leaves identities and issues not centrally related to the primary political division technically negligible for political stability. That cross-segmental policy issues in general and those specifically of concerns to women in divided societies enjoy low priority in dominant political parties is well documented. There is no agreement on why it is so. This paper analyses the system-level incentives that segmental parties in Northern Ireland follow when crowding out concerns and interests that might be relevant for individual voters identifying primarily outside the established politically salient cleavages. We conclude that in Northern Ireland, the systematic marginalisation of ‘women-specific issues’ is not systemic but rather highlights system-given opportunities for major political parties to avoid engagement with socially salient issues at no electoral cost.

KEYWORDS:

• Women specific interests
• segmental parties
• divided societies
• consociational power-sharing
• representative politics

Many observers recognise that consociational power-sharing arrangements are ‘primarily concerned with political stability’ (O’Flynn, 2010, p. 283). The buy-in of the agents resourceful enough to challenge system stability is central to consociations’ longevity. Lijphart’s original vision of consociational power-sharing involves the ‘acceptance of ethnically based parties as the main parties in elite accommodation rather than a non-sectarian party structure’ (Lijphart, 1968). This can be easily challenged. Dixon, for example, questions the presumption of wider public’s indifference to interests that are left on margins of electoral politics (Dixon, 1997, p. 22). Similarly, Agarin and McCulloch (2020, p. 8) demonstrate that as a result of ethnonational bargaining, individuals identifying outside the dominant identity labels find it disproportionally difficult to mobilise around cross-cutting interests and issues that are made ‘redundant’ by the design of the system of political representation. These include concerns of resident newcomers and non-citizens (Mikhael, 2021) but also of autochthonous groups, who might identify with several dominant communities or with none (Stojanović, 2018), as well as ‘gender roles and the subject positioning of women’ (Coakley, 2009). Thus, a question plagues all consociations – can a wider sets of politically salient interests be represented without upsetting the carefully crafted criteria for political inclusion?

The design of consociational systems puts a premium on fully articulated and politically relevant group identities, the assumption critically assessed in and reflecting the wider scholarly concern for representation (Okin, 1999; Suk, 2010). Democratic inclusion of formerly conflicting groups thus incurs a considerable cost on the representation of individuals coalescing around other identities, and specifically gendered consequences are emphasised by feminist approaches to power-sharing (Byrne & Mcculloch, 2018, p. 250). Consociational power-sharing is ‘gender blind’ because it has a disproportionate effect on the representation of women in decision-making spaces, both descriptively and substantively (Kennedy et al., 2016, p. 619). Pierson and Thomson (2018, p. 103), for example, highlight the fact that ethnic consociations perpetuate an ‘essentialist understanding of human identity’, while Gilmartin (2019, p. 90) notes that women do share common goals across the ethnonational divide, but this does not constitute an ‘innate commonality of interest which can form the basis for sustained political activism’.

Like many groups, ‘women’ are not a homogenous unit and might not share common concerns, and as such, gender equality has been, at good times, a second-order priority to act upon in consociational societies. The narrow vision of representation as a process of standing-in for voters by the parties, descriptive representation, is known to crowd out substantive issues in the process of governance (Mansbridge, 2005; Sookrajowa et al., 2022). The ‘squeezing out’ of some groups and their interests by parties representing a composite majority in consociations contradicts de facto inter-community and individual equality; it can also be regarded as a possible violation of human rights norms, whether domestic, regional, or international (McCrudden & O’Leary, 2013, p. 35).

Thus, the key concern of our paper is whether consociations’ focus on representing key identity groups in decision-making crowds out other identities that might be(come) relevant for individuals identifying differently, i.e., along other established or emergent politically salient cleavages. The normative position of the paper is that for power-sharing consociations to evolve as many expect into consociational democracies, (ethnic) power-sharing needs to demonstrate credibly that at least one other dimension of societally relevant policies is systematically accommodated. Underrepresentation of women and women-specific interests, therefore, throws into sharp relief consociation’s trade-off between democratic stability and democracy’s quality: If the elites representing some electoral segments can neglect to include issues not considered relevant when designing a consociational system, any appeal to cross-segmental concerns may be misrepresented as destabilising the fragile (consociational) democracy.

The paper proceeds in three steps. First, we outline the consociational prescription for representation that underpins the collective dimension of political participation. Second, we outline how political parties catering to politically relevant groups can crowd out cross-segmental concerns; third, using the Northern Ireland case, we illustrate how parties engage with policy issues relevant across society in their electoral manifestos and their elected members in motions in the Assembly. A brief conclusion summarises the key role that segmental parties can play as spoilers of consociation’s progress on cross-segmental issues at no electoral cost, hampering consociational democracy’s anticipated transformative promise for divided places to reduce the salience of group identification over time.

Representation in Consociational Democracy

Consociational scholarship is a body of – in part conflicting – positions on political practice that take inspiration from Arendt Lijphart’s pillarisation model. In Lijphart’s view, consociational governance ensures stability if institutional guarantees for proportional representation of representatives of all politically significant groups, a grand coalition, groups’ segmental autonomy, and veto rights to protect group-based interests are in place (Lijphart, 1968).

Consociational scholars suggest that this institutional framework encourages compromise at the elite level and, consequently, the stability of the system. Parties’ ability to represent the interests of their electoral segment is central to making the mechanisms of consociational power-sharing work yet may, as Kurt Luther notes, result in the evolution of a ‘de facto elite political cartel’ if segmental parties consolidate control over a high proportion of legislative portfolios (Bochsler & Juon, 2021; Luther, 1999, p. 11). The trade-off between cartelisation and representation, however, may be justified in deeply divided societies: Since parties are responsible for legitimising political consensus and should ‘encourage their constituents to support the political system’ (Hayes & Mcevoy, 2018, p. 67), they are expected to stand for their electoral segment in order to compromise with each other and promote relationships between societal segments from the level of decision making through to ‘inter-communal bargaining’ (McEvoy, 2017, p. 219).

Yet while some scholars anticipate that group-based representation will allow shared interests to flow into the legislative process and encourage intergroup cooperation, in reality, such issues more often than not have been put on the backburner of the political process. ‘Reaching across the divide’ by political parties is an exception, not the rule, in consociations: ensuring that political parties are representing the interests of their voters that reach beyond their core ethnopolitical agendas in the long-term has been challenging (Stojanović, 2018). The role that segmental parties can play in uploading voter concerns into political agendas is determined by two consociational principles: their mandatary representation in the executive and access to veto.

On the one hand, guaranteed participation in a power-sharing executive qua representatives of politically salient ethno-social segments is increasingly recognised by scholars as a tool for intra-bloc competition. The bonus of potential access to government is acknowledged as having an effect of limiting intergroup integration and downgrading the relevance of cross-segmental issues for parties’ electoral success (Luther, 1999). Bogaards (2014, p. 7) highlights that the ability of parties to articulate segmental interests, mobilise voters, and organise politically precluding cross-segmental appeal simplifies the needs of their electoral constituency and undermines the diversity of voters’ expectations.

On the other, while veto by representatives of politically significant segments is often seen as encouraging intersegmental cooperation at the stage of institutional design, it is often derided as an electoral tool that ensures cohesion by the dominant parties over intra-segmental competitors. This mechanism allows polarised representatives to avoid fragmenting their electoral base and adopting a controversial if not outright un-cooperative attitude to power-sharing partners (Mitchell et al., 2009, pp. 397–398). McCulloch offers plentiful evidence on the use of the veto mechanism by segmental parties to protect their own rather than their segments’ interests from the encroachment of challengers: There is ample evidence from Burundi, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Northern Ireland that veto has been repeatedly used to halt decisions on issues that lay beyond core community concerns (McCulloch & Vandeginste, 2019; McCulloch & Zdeb, 2022).

In short, Lijphart’s view of the mechanics of inter-elite cooperation, though central for the effective functioning of representation in consociations, has shown itself to be too idealistic in many consociations (Luther & Deschouwer, 1999; Stojanović, 2020). And it is the practice of representation in consociational systems that has been in the focus of much criticism. Hayes and McAllister acknowledge that accommodating segmental identities does have adverse effects on the quality of party-based representation in consociational democracies, pointing to ‘the disjuncture from the realities of the lives of ordinary citizens, as well its negation of other forms of social division in favour of communal identity’ (2013, p. 124).

Needless to say, the neglect in policymaking process of identity groups and interests that cut across or do not align with those supporting the system of institutionalised divisions does not destabilise the system or mechanisms political representation per se. Yet, the stability of the system does depend, to a certain degree, on groups that have political relevance, regardless of whether they cut across communities. As long as consociations formally qualify as participatory democracies, their voters can, at regular intervals, confirm or otherwise deny the ability of their elites to represent and to achieve political outcomes expected by the public. The electoral process, however circumscribed, allows for alternative agendas to eventually emerge and crystallise.

Thus, to claim that all segmental elites are complicit in marginalising identities, issues, and interests of concern to groups not deemed politically salient would mean to neglect the individual dimension of political participation: What the consociational scholarship thus expects to see are the political representatives engaging in good faith with their electorate’s concerns, not necessarily with cross-segmental voters or their interests. In the practice of consociational politics, however, parties act as doorways to representative politics and as guarantors of political stability (Matthews, 2016). As such, they may deem some cross-segmental concerns worth accommodating and marginalise others if they are perceived to be destabilising.

Only recently has the literature focused on the mechanics of representation that allow politically salient groups to marginalise and override group-relevant concerns of Others, that is, an electorate ‘ideologically de-aligned’ from the major ethnopolitical divide (Tonge et al., 2020, p. 465; see also Agarin & Jarrett, 2022; Murtagh & McCulloch, 2021). These studies agree that the consociational mechanisms undermining opportunities to represent cross-segmental groups and interests are context dependent and defined by elites who thus forego ‘responsibility’ sharing (Byrne & Mcculloch, 2018).

To a large extent, group-based access to positions in government and in the public sector encourages politically significant groups to rely on ‘rigid sectarian criteria’ (Nagle & Fakhoury, 2018, p. 92) to mobilise politically behind the descriptive representation. The Belgian constitutional reforms of the 1980s created separate executive and administrative institutions at multiple levels of government, resulting in a spiralling ethnicisation of the party landscape (Deschouwer, 1994) and the hollowing out of the decision-making capacity of the federal government on cross-segmental policies (Haute & Wauters, 2019). Likewise, in Lebanon, cross-sectarian concerns are falling by the wayside, whether they relate to environmental issues, newcomers, or women’s rights (Mikhael, 2021; Nagle & Fakhoury, 2018). And in Bosnia and Herzegovina, political representation mirrors the central, ethnicity-based cleavage agreed upon in 1996 and ensures Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats proportional representation in government bodies (Piacentini, 2021; Zdeb, 2016). As Hulsey and Keil point out, commitment to consociational governance encourages ethnonational elites to consolidate their position in government and their privileged access to positions of high esteem, undermining non-nationalist parties’ appeal or marginalising their representatives once elected, despite their broad electoral support (2019).

Generally, the scholarship on consociations agrees that elected politicians’ limited ability to compromise and work to represent the interests, not identities, of their voters may result in widespread dejection in the segmental parties’ electorate (Mitchell et al., 2009). The experience of ethnopolitical polarisation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, North Macedonia, South Tyrol, and Northern Ireland clearly demonstrates that segmental parties reinforce and bolster a system both as protectors of community and as mediators of their segment’s interests in the political process. In the absence of systemic incentives to ‘water down’ group-relevant interests (Mitchell et al., 2009, p. 402), voters will view community identities as key ‘building blocks’ for political representation (McCulloch, 2017, p. 4), allowing segmental parties to stymie discussions of the socially relevant cross-segmental issues in their relationship with other parties and their own voters.

However, underrepresentation of politically less salient identities and issues does not mean that these issues are of lesser relevance for the electorate or unlikely to challenge the foundations of political system in place from a different issue angle: If segmental parties embrace gradual political accommodation and incorporate moderate changes into their political agendas, we are likely to see a pillarisation of the polarised segmental context. In the next section, we discuss how this process unfolds in Northern Ireland.

Parties and Cross-Segmental Issues in Northern Ireland

Despite considerable interest in consociational scholarship, attention to the relationship between the political parties in Northern Ireland and substantive representation has been rather limited. The consociational rules for the party-based representation in place since the Good Friday Agreement determine not only ethnonational parties’ ascendancy in Northern Ireland. What Deiana calls the ‘de facto ethno-national straightjacket’ (2016, p. 109) has also encouraged scholars to view political competition as occurring mainly between representatives of communities for their votes and between nationalist and unionist blocs for access to power (Tilley et al., 2008, pp. 699–701). ‘Vote-gathering’ behind the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin has meant that they have not only ‘dwarfed’ smaller parties but dominate executive portfolios where the political agenda is predominantly set (Wilford, 2010, p. 138).

Thus, issue marginalisation in the formal political process in Northern Ireland persists despite an electoral system (proportional representation, PR, via a single transferable vote, STV) favourable to moderation of ethnopolitical rhetoric: lower-preference votes should ideally encourage parties to moderate policy positions in order to appeal for second-preference votes (Jarrett, 2016). The d’Hondt rules for government formation ought to encourage cooperation between intercommunal rivals on substantive issues even before votes are cast because seats in the executive are allocated according to ‘preference intensities’ expressed in elections (McGarry & O’Leary, 2006, p. 264). The combination of PR-STV and mixed constituencies in theory offers, among others, an increase in the number of women candidates and representatives by providing more opportunities for these candidates in constituencies with higher seat magnitudes.

In practice, however, the electoral system in Northern Ireland has failed to break down voting on subcultural community lines and has only increased intercommunal and intra-segmental party competition. The necessity of cross-community support in some legislative decisions, mutual veto rights, and community designation rules incentivise voting in the Assembly on ethnonational lines by establishing ‘two orders of Assembly members’ in decision making – ‘those whose votes always count and those whose votes never do’ (Wilford, 2010, p. 139). Until the rules were changed in 2020, the permissive system allowed just one segmental party, the DUP, to hold the threshold of 30 seats needed to define vital interests of ‘its’ ethnic constituency flexibly and to trigger a veto alone. On multiple occasions, DUP has used its position in the Assembly to ground policy evolution to a halt, referencing their ‘evangelical convictions’, which inform their restrictive views on gender in general and specifically on women’s role in society (Haughey, 2020).

In short, two consociational institutions – guaranteed government participation of strongest ethnopolitical segments and veto rights to protect community autonomy – made it near impossible for cross-segmental issues to progress into policies without the support of politically relevant ‘tribunes’, who are the ‘choke points’ in the system (Nagle, 2020, p. 141). This is broadly reflected in voter perceptions of which parties represent their interests best: In a recent LucidTalk poll (Spring 2023), respondents were asked which parties would be most successful if the Assembly elections were held tomorrow. The results suggested that Sinn Féin and the DUP were seen as the staunchest defenders of nationalist and unionist interests, respectively. This perception cleaved neatly along the community lines: only 2% of Sinn Féin’s and DUP’s support came from another community (LucidTalk, 2023). In contrast, support for segmental parties maintains the clearly consolidated ‘third tradition’ of the cross-segmental Alliance Party Northern Ireland (APNI) and Green Party, which privilege issues of equality broadly conceived and draw upon voters disidentifying from the Protestant/Catholic polarity (Tonge, 2020) (Table 1).

Table 1. Voting intention and gendered breakdown, 2023.

Party	Total	Female respondents	Male respondents
Sinn Féin	29%	33%	25%
DUP	25%	17%	33%
Alliance	13%	15%	11%
UUP	11%	13%	9%
TUV	7%	5%	9%
SDLP	7%	10%	4%
Green Party	2%	2%	3%

Source: Lucid Talk (2023) ‘If an Assembly Election were held tomorrow, which political party would be your first preference?’

An ever-growing segment of the electorate identifies with neither community, nor any party that claims to protect their interest: According to the recent Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, 42% identify with neither a unionist nor nationalist label, thus making up the largest ‘community’ of respondents (Hayward & Rosher, 2021). But intra-bloc competition leads segmental parties to simultaneously curb avenues for formally representing those who either do not identify with or do not vote according to segmental party’s agenda and claim that issues outside the boundaries of ethnic group are not politically salient. The recent consolidation of segmental parties’ voter base results from intra-communal competition and the squeezing of the moderates, such as the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) (Tonge et al., 2020).

The barriers for representation particularly of women and women-specific issues have been the focus of consociational scholarship dealing with different cases and across time (Deiana, 2018; Mikhael, 2021; Nagle & Fakhoury, 2018; Potter, 2019). Along similar lines, the literature on political competition in Northern Ireland (Hayes & Mcevoy, 2018; Taylor, 2009; Tilley et al., 2008) has focused on party-political behaviour related to the lack of gender parity within representative bodies in the province, the conservative cultural norms underpinning Northern Ireland’s political process, and crude intersegmental competition (Kilmurray & McWilliams, 2011; Sheldon et al., 2020; Thomson, 2016). Similarly, Matthews and Whiting (2022) establish that even female leadership of the major parties in Northern Ireland cannot be seen as an indication of a shift from patriarchal politics, and Byrne and McCulloch (2017) locate the gendered exclusion in Northern Ireland within their broader criticism of consociational theory. All these scholars recognise the gender-exclusive nature of Northern Irish society as reflected in and impacting on policymaking in the Assembly. However, it is necessary to assess how parties, as agents of representation in consociational system, sustain their electoral positionality despite neglecting widely shared cross-segmental concerns, such as women-specific issues.

Since consociations encourage representation of groups, we anticipate that parties will incentivise their voters to make electoral choices in reflection of their group-relevant, that is, collective, political preferences in electoral manifestos. Consociation’s political parties therefore would be more likely to neglect non-dominant groups and issues that do not directly relate to the central societal cleavage to be re-elected. Yet beyond the electoral phase, we expect that some parties and their Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) can bring cross-segmental, societally relevant issues including those of gender-based equality to the Assembly floor. Whether and how parties and MLAs do so for ideological (i.e., genuine commitment to equality) or instrumental (marking their openness to issues of concern to non-core electorate) reasons does not interfere with our assessment of how they seek to appeal to concerned voter constituency.

The following two sections assess parties position on ‘women-specific issues’ in two cycles of partisanship. We have decided to include childcare, domestic violence, equal pay, equal opportunity, gender-based violence, and reproductive rights under the contentious label (see similar use in Potter, 2019, pp. 114–115). We do not believe that these challenges are exclusive to women; rather we use the short-cut phrase ‘women-specific issues’ to refer to social practices which – in Northern Ireland and globally – affect women differently from men, disproportionately and adversely impacting on their equal opportunities as individual and collective societal, economic, and political actors.

For our assessment, we rely on evidence from party manifestos and policy motions in which parties spell out their envisaged priorities to deliver a ‘substantive policy of inclusion’ (Galligan, 2013, p. 415). Comparing manifestos allows us to identify priorities and the appeal by which parties do not expect to win elections. We can then assess which parties raise ‘women-specific issues’ on the floor of the Assembly and how often to identify who is underrepresenting women’s concerns in the legislature. We focus on five main political parties in Northern Ireland tabling motions throughout the Assembly mandates of 2011–2016, 2016 up to the collapse of power-sharing in 2017, and the reinstatement of the five-party coalition in 2020 to 2021, as well as their electoral manifestos for the 2017 Assembly Elections. More recent elections in 2019 into the U.K. Parliament and 2022 Assembly Elections offer detail on the (somewhat adjusted) party electoral positioning. Yet, since seats allocated in (majoritarian) Westminster are hard to convert into policies for voters in Northern Ireland, and because the Assembly elected in May 2022 has not sat (as of May 2023), we cannot contrast the impact of interparty competition (from manifestos) with their performance as advocates of their voters’ interests (from motions).

Women’s Issues in Party Manifestos

Increasing the visibility of women in public and leadership roles would be just one of the options to ensure women voice and somewhat more equitable representation of their specific concerns. Women-specific and broad-based issues such as equal progression in the workplace and fair pay are not germane to any single ethnic group; thus, platforming these concerns in manifestos as part of the official party position might be perceived as an opportunity for some electoral payoff. Yet otherwise, manifestos by parties in Northern Ireland suggest that a commitment to descriptive representation of identity groups in power-sharing arrangement ‘sacrifice[s] women’s claims for equality’ in the interests of communal balance and ethnonational concerns (Hayes & McAllister, 2013, p. 124) (Table 2).

Table 2. Women-specific issues in manifestos of Northern Ireland’s major political parties.

Party	Women-Specific Issues in Party Manifestos
Alliance	Promoting gender considerations into careers promotion, mentoring scheme to assist women in the public and private sectors with the aim to increase the number of women in decision-making positions, developing and promoting policies in the workplace to better facilitate retention and progression for women, renewing efforts to tackle equal pay and implement regulations about public audits of the gender profile of pay by larger employers, calling for global ban on female genital mutilation, education for women and girls to be recognised as party of the U.K.’s international development spending
DUP	N/A
SDLP	Increasing free childcare provision, safeguarding existing funding for childcare through the Childcare Strategy and ensuring this is utilised, institutional abuse including direct mention of ‘mother and child homes’ and provision of victim-centred funding, Rights to protect breastfeeding mothers in public places, cross-departmental Domestic Violence Strategy
Sinn Féin	Commitment to give ‘full expression to the rights of all sections of the electorate’, regardless of gender
UUP	Affordable childcare

As the only principal party in Northern Ireland not to designate itself as part of the politically significant community, APNI does not have a discrete segment to mobilise in elections, offering instead a detailed programmatic manifesto that addresses substantive issues affecting all voters. Its electoral manifesto has a section devoted solely to women’s interests. Policy positions here include mentoring schemes to assist women in the public and private sectors, developing policies in the workplace to better facilitate progression for women, renewing efforts to tackle the gender pay gap, and tackling sexual and gender-based violence (Alliance Party, 2017). Noteworthy is the fact that the APNI was the only party to separate women’s issues from other policy positions, such as on childcare and social services. Bringing forward not just those concerns that disproportionately affect women and appeal across communities marks APNI’s electoral profile without undermining its position in a system of representation that privileges segmental parties (Agarin & Jarrett, 2022).

In contrast, the DUP manifesto makes no mention of ‘women’ or ‘gender’ at all (DUP, 2017). Any women-related issue is phrased as a family one; for example, the manifesto alludes to ‘childcare initiatives’ developed through family and parenting support hubs. In contrast, the party lays out ten key positions in relation to clear-cut segmental concerns: Sinn Féin, ‘republican, partnership’, and the constitutional question in the context of ‘fundamental unionist principles’. The party was concerned with presenting itself as a ‘leading unionist party’, implying ethnic outbidding and intra-bloc competition with other unionist parties (DUP, 2017). In contrast, in the manifesto of the UUP, another unionist party, affordable childcare is addressed as a women-specific issue, linking it to women’s labour market participation (‘to enter or return to the workforce’). Here, too, the reference to the DUP as the party that failed to deliver a childcare strategy hints at intra-bloc competition rather than as substantive commitment to this policy (UUP, 2017).

Sinn Féin’s manifesto spells out some of its women-specific pledges. The party promises to uphold the ‘democratic mandate to and give full expression to the rights and entitlements of all sections of the electorate regardless of national identity, political allegiance, sexual orientation, gender or class’ and lists ‘gender equality’ under equality priorities but keeps silent on how such a strategy would be put in place (Sinn Féin, 2017). SDLP, another nationalist party, promises to increase free childcare provision and to safeguard existing funding, tackle legacies of institutional abuse, including those of ‘mother and child homes’, and develop a cross-departmental strategy to help victims of domestic violence (SDLP, 2017). While SDLP sets out a comprehensive set of pledges to tackle justice issues intersectionally, the DUP and Sinn Féin have neglected the cross-cutting approach. For example, the SDLP manifesto committed to tackle non-ethnic inequality in referencing legislation for same-sex marriage. However, while the manifesto indicated that the party was perhaps more committed to non-ethnic inequalities than hardline ethnic parties, its manifesto also made clear the party’s opposition to reproductive autonomy through the extension of the 1967 Act.

In the past, Galligan suggested that the APNI has long recognised the significance of women representatives, whereas even moderate parties such as the SDLP and UUP deployed a ‘seesaw pattern of women’s vote bonus’ and fielded women candidates in a ‘token’ way (Galligan, 2013, p. 424). More recently, Matthews and Whiting (2022, p. 225) note that gendered leadership change in the DUP and Sinn Féin owed ‘more to parties’ informal practices and ad hoc strategies than formal modifications or deeply embedded structural change at the system level’. Our brief assessment of manifestos indicates that parties raising women’s substantive concerns were also likely to encourage female candidates on party lists. In fact, the 2016 manifestos of both the APNI and Sinn Féin featured a comparable number of policies aiming at gender inclusion that reflected upon the ‘Gender and Peace-building Toolkit’ developed locally in the context of global evolution of the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda (Hinds & Donnelly, 2014). This context allowed APNI to further mainstream its focus on women’s concerns and encouraged segmental parties, principally Sinn Féin, to expand attention to women in their manifesto, resulting in the gradual increase of the proportion of women representatives elected to the Assembly on both parties lists in 2022 to 8% and 16%, respectively.

Party manifestos offer a sobering perspective on four segmental Northern Ireland’s parties – DUP, UUP, Sinn Féin, and SDLP – whose focus on the (projected) needs of their community is foregrounded in manifestos. The DUP particularly offers narrowly defined, ethnic community-centred manifestos, builds in references to inter- and intra-ethnic competition, and subsumes concern for women’s issues under constitutional cohesion agenda. Though Sinn Féin, UUP and SDLP seek support of their programmes mainly in their electoral segment, they also address some gender-related policy needs in a cross-segmental way. Whether and how far any of these proposals would be agreed upon or taken up by the government after the elections is usually constrained by the procedure as well as constraints of interparty bargaining in the Assembly. In the following, we consider who – after the elections – raises women-specific issues to be discussed on its floor.

Women’s Issues in the Assembly Motions

Having established that women’s interests in particular do not make up the part of the mix that segmental parties perceived to bring significant electoral payoff, we sought to understand which parties’ MLAs upload women’s concerns into political debate from the floor of the Assembly. To answer this question, we looked beyond the party rhetoric and focuses on MLAs, women or men, raising substantive concerns relevant for women’s equality by searching the plenary motions in the Assembly online archive; the Assembly’s agenda is an important source for understanding party attitude towards policies tangent on women’s rights in part because individual party positions are sometimes hard to define, and many issues are polarising (Thomson, 2016). Our search returned executive motions, private members motions, and urgent oral questions on issues of childcare, domestic violence, equal pay, equal opportunity, reproductive rights, and violence against women. We excluded amendments from our review, but the issue of equal opportunity often appeared in tabled motions on equality between the communities, such as in education, which we counted in since early education, domestic care, and childcare disproportionately affect women’s economic equality and their ability to progress in socioeconomic terms (see also Potter, 2019). We are confident that we have scoped most (if not all) of the discussions affecting women. We are aware that some executive motions included might have been initiated by members of government and are more reflective of the priorities in the executive or to ensure compliance of local with the national legislation. The executive motions are therefore not always reflecting the needs of the electorate. Further, one of these, the Childcare Payments Bill, is a legislative consent motion (LCM). LCMs are a mechanism for devolved legislatures to agree (or otherwise) that the U.K. Parliament can legislate over a devolved competence, and are thus unreflective of parties’ investment in the subject matter. The following table includes all motions and urgent oral questions to provide the general overview of the activity in the Assembly during the given period.

In the Northern Ireland Assembly, concerns over women’s issues are mostly raised by cross-segmental parties and only then picked up by other (moderate) political forces. This tradition has historical traction in the short-lived Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition bringing concerns of women into ‘inclusive dialogue’ (Kilmurray & McWilliams, 2011, p. 4) but failing to secure long-term support and recognition for gender-sensitive agenda in a system privileging ethnicity-based representation (Hayes & Mcevoy, 2018).

The provision for childcare centrally impacts women’s employment opportunities, and assessing which parties in the Assembly are willing to table motions to this effect helps understand the place and priority of women’s participation in society to different parties. The set of data from the Northern Ireland Equality Commission from the same time period shows that 58% of women in Northern Ireland with dependent children worked full time, compared to 95% of men. Additionally, women from working-class backgrounds are more likely to be affected by the lack of affordable childcare since it costs on average one-third of weekly wages in Northern Ireland (Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, 2020). Our search returned no results for equal pay and equal opportunity, which in itself demonstrates the lack of consideration of gender parity among political parties’ preferences after the elections. This non-aligned, non-controversial issue affecting significant proportions of the electorate in multiple ways still takes up a significantly smaller amount of space in the agenda of segmental parties, allowing the APNI to dominate discussions of childcare in the Assembly.

Domestic and sexual violence against women is another central concern in Northern Ireland that requires dismantling ‘economic barriers to full equality for women’ (O’Rourke & Swaine, 2017, p. 1305). Segmental parties were comparatively open to drawing attention to gender-based violence over any other gender-relevant issue. This is reflected in the number of motions on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence being more evenly spread among parties in the Assembly. The DUP and Sinn Féin account for a somewhat greater proportion of motions tabled, chairing a joint motion on this issue, despite disagreement on avenues for redressing the barriers for social and economic participation of women in society. The limited commitment of the major parties to addressing gender-based violence is reflective of public acceptance and reporting of incidents: Many women lack faith in the criminal justice system and state agencies, contacting the extra-governmental organisations for help in the first instance (Gilmartin, 2019, p. 97). In 2021, Women’s Aid revealed that 5% of all crimes reported to the police in 2019–2020 amounted to 31,187 incidents and 18,640 crimes recorded as domestic abuse, the highest figures since 2004 (Women’s Aid NI 2020).

Over the past decade, the issue of reproductive rights has faced cross-party and cross-ethnic attention, making it a ‘political football’ that entrenched differences between the parties (Thomson, 2016, p. 497). Before abortion was decriminalised in 2019 by the Westminster Parliament in the ‘Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act’, local elites have failed to arrive at consensus and respond to growing public support for regulation. This is despite the overwhelming support in the electorate of the abortion at the time: In 2016, 81% of the polled supported legalisation in the case of fatal fetal anomaly and 78% where pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, whereas 60% believed that abortion should be accessible for women who sought to terminate pregnancy without further reasoning (Sheldon et al., 2020, p. 784). Decisively, more even progress has been stalled by segmental parties: Until 2018, Sinn Féin retained an ambiguous position, fearing desertion by conservative Catholic voters, by settling on a pro-choice position (except for in cases of fetal abnormality), a decision that effectively encouraged the formation of the pro-life, nationalist Aontú. On the ‘orange’ side, the DUP repeatedly used its towering position in the Assembly to recall members, use the veto, introduce new bills, and even put pressure on the Speaker to suspend voting rules to block the abortion regulations from eventually coming into force on 14 May 2020 (Bloomer & Campbell, 2022).

It is significant that while some parties, notably the SDLP, UUP, and APNI, treated their MLAs’ position on abortion as a matter of conscience, Sinn Féin and the DUP applied strict party discipline. Although, as Schwartz (2014, p. 4) puts it, there is no ‘distinctly unionist or nationalist aspect to the question of whether a woman should have the right to make decisions about what happens within her own body;’ throughout the time, only the cross-segmental APNI, Green Party, and People Before Profit remained consistently pro-choice. Though some Alliance MLAs have indeed held anti-abortion views, the party was the foremost to table motions related to position of women in society. In comparison, and despite recent positive advocacy for abortion, Sinn Féin, as noted by Thompson, originally did so more to distinguish itself from ethnic competitors within the group than out of an intrinsic commitment to women’s equality (Thomson, 2016, p. 497). This, however, is not to suggest that bringing non-ethnic, women-specific concerns to the attention of voters and fellow legislators may negatively affect segmental parties’ electoral success in the long run.

We were not surprised to see that the parties neglecting women’s concerns in electoral manifestos also have low number of motions: Despite making up a significantly smaller portion of the Assembly, the cross-segmental APNI MLAs tabled around one-third of all party motions spanning childcare, domestic violence, violence against women, equal pay, equal opportunity, and reproductive rights, despite making up only 7.7%, 7.0%, and 8.9% of the Assembly in 2011, 2016, and 2017, respectively. Moreover, we can see that MLAs from the Green Party, People Before Profit, as well as an independent (designated, Unionist) MLA collectively tabled the same number of motions as the DUP and the SDLP at around 16% of the total, while making up a significantly smaller section of the Assembly. Despite consolidating a larger number of seats, Sinn Féin and the DUP tabled a significantly smaller number of motions addressing the same set of issues, both at around 22% and 16%, respectively. It is also significant that despite being the third-largest party in the Assembly, the UUP did not table any motion to address women-specific issues at all. As a moderate nationalist party, it is surprising that the SDLP tabled a lower number of motions relating to the position of women in society in the period than Sinn Féin (see Table 3).

Table 3. Women-specific issues in motions tabled to the NI assembly (2011–2021).

Criteria	Mandate	Motion Title	Plenary Type; MLAs Party identity
Childcare	2011–2016	Childcare strategy	Private member’s motion (PMM); Independent
		Increasing free childcare	PMM; SDLP
		Legislative consent motion: childcare payments bill	Executive Motion; DUP/Sinn Féin
		Childcare in Northern Ireland (04/2014)	PMM; APNI
		Childcare in Northern Ireland (08/2014)	PMM; APNI
		Early education and care legislation (including financing of early childcare services) (2012)	PMM; APNI
		Early education and care legislation (2011)	PMM; APNI
		Early education and care bill	PIMM; APNI
	2016–2017	Good quality early years education, support and childcare	PMM; Green
		Early years development and pre-school childcare	PPM; SDLP
	2020–2021	Gender inclusive economy	PMM; Sinn Féin
		Impact of COVID-19 (including ‘gendered impact’)	PMM; SDLP
		Childcare	PMM; Sinn Féin
		Childcare strategy	PMM; DUP
		Childcare for all	PMM; People Before Profit
		Childcare on school grounds (19 October 2020)	Urgent Oral Question; APNI
		Childcare on school grounds (20 October 2020)	Urgent Oral Question; APNI
Domestic Violence	2011–2016	Justice bill: further consideration stage	Executive Motion; APNI
		Jobseeker’s allowance (Domestic Violence Amendment) regulations 2013	Executive Motion; DUP
		Jobseeker’s allowance (Domestic Violence Amendment) regulations 2012	Executive Motion; DUP
		Domestic Violence	PMM; DUP
	2016–2017	The draft Civil Legal Services regulations (including domestic violence)	Executive Motion; Independent
		Domestic Abuse, Rape and Sexual Crime	PMM; Sinn Féin
	2020–2021	Violence against women and girls strategy	PMM; SDLP
		Legislative consent motion: Domestic abuse bill	Executive Motion; APNI
		Violence against women	PMM; SDLP
Equal Pay and Equal Opportunity	N/A	N/A	N/A
Violence against Women/Sexual Violence	2011–2016	Non-molestation orders	PMM; Sinn Féin/DUP
	2016–2017	N/A	N/A
	2020–2021	Violence against women and girls strategy	PMM; Sinn Féin
		Strategy to combat violence against women and girls	Urgent Oral Question; SDLP
Reproductive Rights/Abortion	2011–2016	Abortion guidelines	Urgent Oral Question; APNI
	2016–2017	Campaign for abortion law reform in Northern Ireland	Executive Motion (based on public petition); Green Party
	2020–2021	(Response to) Cessation of EMA services in the Western Health and Social Care Trust	Urgent Oral Question; Sinn Féin
		Abortion Services	Urgent Oral Question; APNI
		(Response to) Severe Foetal Impairment Abortion (Amendment) Bill	PMM APNI
		Abortion Services	Urgent Oral Question; People Before Profit
		Abortion Services	Urgent Oral Question; Sinn Féin

The evidence from the party manifestos and tabled motions leads us to conclude that the neglect of substantive concerns of a significant part of the electorate – one that does not map neatly on the segmental identity undergirding the day-to-day politics in a consociational system simply – is not of concern to the legislators elected on segmental parties’ platforms. Our assessment of manifestos and motions is useful in setting up a comparative understanding of why some parties are unlikely to engage with the substantive equality of Northern Ireland’s women across a ten-year period.

Ultimately, while there may be no structural barriers precluding equal representation of women’s concerns in manifestos and Assembly debates, even the liberal consociational arrangements encourage mobilising and rewarding salient identities in the electorate (McGarry, 2017, p. 282). The increase in the number of women as electoral candidates among all parties and the rise in the number in the Assembly overall to 37% of MLAs is certainly a welcome development in the bipolar Northern Ireland consociation. Yet despite the growth of cross-segmental representation, the number of both women candidates, and women-specific motions, women’s equal representation in political and public life remains the domain of parties that draw upon the discourse of in-group protection for electoral benefits. In the system of representation valuing accountability on the basis of matching identity of the voters with those elected representatives – rather than the sync in programmatic interest necessary to address the gender-based inequality in society – polarising campaigning is reflective of systemic incentives that remain persistent.

Conclusion

Consociational peace agreements aim to ensure stability ahead of justice issues (Byrne & McCulloch, 2017, p. 258). The effect is representation of groups over representation of groups’ interest. In this paper, we have discussed how system-relevant institutional rules encourage party competition between and within segments, squeezing moderate agendas and cross-segmental concerns onto the margin of political debate. Our analysis shows that consociations’ segmental parties may retain electoral weight without much consideration for key cross-segmental concerns, women-specific issues, despite their relevance across the community divide.

Focusing on the challenges to representing substantive interests allowed us to dissect the difficulties of fielding women’s issues in a political process that encourages parties to define their voters’ interests narrowly, if not outright in terms of a zero-sum political competition. This strategy proves particularly effective if parties on one end of the ethnopolitical polarity expedite attention to non- and cross-segmental issues. As such, Northern Ireland’s political parties, operating within the constraints of the extant consociational infrastructure, are disincentivised from pursuing issues specific to women in a cross-ethnic, cross-party manner. Tracking party manifestos as well as party-political debates in the Northern Ireland Assembly, we have illustrated that some of Northern Ireland’s segmental (ethnically aligned) parties are not only disproportionately less likely to advance cross-segmental, women-specific concerns in campaign and competition. Bolstered by the consociational instruments in place, some are able to thwart tackling these concerns in the legislative space, while their segmental competitors might choose to moderate their stance and gradually become more accommodating on ‘women’s issues’ as a point of principle. That the issues lying outside the focus of concerns for ‘pillar parties’ (Luther, 1999, p. 7) can help emergent cross-segmental parties such as the Alliance, the Greens, and People Before Profit, to perform better in elections but fail to impact policy development is therefore the result of the Assembly rules.

Since parties occupy a significant position in all political systems, consociations included, critique of the underrepresentation of women-specific issues in consociational politics should be levelled not at institutions per se but on their effect on preference formation for descriptive representation of pre-defined societal segments via parties (see Sookrajowa et al., 2022). In Northern Ireland, the quality of representation is not limited by the system design but reflects parties’ opportunistic behaviour in following the system-relevant rules that are potentially open for reform yet discourage substantive representation overall and of women’s concerns specifically. Parties enjoying a guaranteed voice in government and opportunity to block legislative progress can neglect their own constituents’ substantive concerns without paying electoral costs. Women’s ability to field motions in the Assembly, regardless of whether they pursue gender equality, is thus constrained by the institutionalised rules of competition between the segmental parties. As we point out in the analysis of parties’ manifestos and Assembly motions, the translation of emergent cross-cutting cleavages in society has been repeatedly undermined by their persistent neglect by and ethnopolitical polarisation of representatives.

The critical literature thus far has recognised the inherent exclusionary bias of consociational rules for representation of groups not deemed politically salient and consequently, the systemic neglect of cross-segmental concerns. That there are parties that platform cross-segmental constituency interest is important: They ensure better, more democratic and more inclusive representation of concerns emerging from the bottom up in societies where group identities enjoy political salience as a result of institutional designs. This also reveals that the nature of representation preferred by political parties is important: Since fielding more female candidates does not per se enhance the salience of, as in our case, women’s or feminist voices, it will also not shake up ‘parties’ inner structures, cultural dispositions and electoral-political machinations’ (Matthews & Whiting, 2022, p. 237). The substantive representation of cross-segmental issues, however, may do so. Our discussion of parties’ appeal to a narrow support base shows that cross-segmental concerns, such as women-specific interests, are outside the structure of rewards in consociational systems. As such, consociation’s segmental parties ‘merely’ follow the systemic incentives when crowding out cross-segmental issues and concerns from their agendas.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Timofey Agarin

Timofey Agarin is a Reader in Comparative Politics and Ethnic Conflict, Queen's University Belfast, where he has been leading the ESRC funded project ‘Exclusion amid Inclusion: Power-Sharing and Non-Dominant Minorities’ (2017–2021). E-mail: [email protected]