Women's Substantive Representation: Defending Feminist Interests or Women's Electoral Preferences?

Abstract

To what extent does the inclusion of marginalised groups in policymaking institutions influence policy outcomes? This article examines whether and under which conditions female legislators are more likely to represent women's interests compared with male legislators. Building on the literature on women's substantive representation, it is argued that the advocacy of women's interests by female representatives depends on a number of factors, namely party affiliation, contact with women's organisations, electoral district, and seniority. This argument is evaluated using vote-level fixed-effect models based on a unique data set from a direct democratic context that combines representatives' voting behaviour, women's voting preferences, and recommendations from feminist groups. The findings show that female legislators defend feminist interests more than their male colleagues but that they only marginally respond to women's electoral preferences. Moreover, gender has its most visible effect within the populist party.

Keywords:

• representation
• women's interests
• women's electoral preferences
• roll call votes
• Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Simon Hug for sharing his data (Hug, 2010) and for his comments. Thanks are also due to Joscha Legewie and Reto Wuest for their suggestions. Previous versions of this article have also benefited from the comments of Thanh-Huyen Ballmer-Cao, Pascal Sciarini, Manon Tremblay, and Lea Sgier.

Notes

1. Women make up 20 per cent of elected officials in parliaments worldwide and 23 per cent in European countries (Inter-parliamentary Union, 2012).

2. Political rights were granted to women in 1971 at the federal level.

3. ‘Those who may hold attitudes consistent with major feminist organizations but be unwilling to associate themselves with feminists' (Carroll, 1984, as cited in Dodson, 2001, p. 228).

4. Only 17 councillors out of 378 (13 women and four men) declared themselves to be members of at least one women's group.

5. These feminist groups are all situated on the left of the political spectrum, as there were not any MPs who were affiliated to right-wing women's organisations.

6. These recommendations can be found on the FCWI's website: http://www.ekf.admin.ch/?lang=fr

7. Vox surveys can be found on the FORS website: http://forsdata.unil.ch

8. All popular votes are listed on the Confederations' website (http://www.admin.ch), which also provides clear information on whether a legislative project has been accepted/refused by the people and by the parliament.

9. Among these 91 popular votes, the FCWI issued recommendations for only 19 projects. These 19 projects are included in the category labelled ‘feminist interests', which was discussed earlier.

10. A list of parties and their abbreviated names are as follows: UDC = Union démocratique du centre = Swiss People's Party; PRL = Parti libéral-radical = Liberal-radical Party; PDC = Parti démocrate-chrétien = Christian-democratic Party; PSS = Parti socialiste Suisse = Social-democratic Party; PES = Parti écologiste Suisse = Green Party.

11. Griffin, Newman, and Wolbrecht (2012) used a similar approach to assess women's preferences. They compared constituents' preferences on a specific issue with their representatives' roll call votes on the same issue. Moreover, they selected issues for which there are significant gender differences in mass preferences. The authors conclude that there is no gender gap in dyadic policy representation in the US Congress.

Additional information

Note on Author

Anouk Lloren is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Swiss National Science Foundation and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva