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ABSTRACT
Existing scholarship underscores the contested nature of the relationship between women’s representation and right-wing parties. This article contributes to this literature by examining women’s substantive representation in Poland under the right-wing populist Law and Justice government from 2015 to 2019. It is specifically concerned with the “what” and “when” of substantive representation: while the former deals with various women’s issues, the latter concerns the conversion of issues into policies. Using representation theory and refined partisan theory, this article sheds light on gendered representation, an issue often overlooked in the scholarly literature on women and politics in Central and Eastern Europe.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on this article. I would like to thank the Editor of East European Politics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Celis and Childs (Citation2014, 4) define women’s interests as “the content given to particular issues.”
2 Women might have interests (or perspectives to use Lovenduski’s Citation2005 term) related to other policies, but they may be indirectly linked to women’s experiences.
3 During the 2015–19 period, the parties of the Left were not represented in parliament so there was no discussion about the issues proposed by leftist female deputies.
4 In the 2015 election, almost 12% of the votes were cast for the parties of the left, which were not represented in parliament. The electoral coalition of the United Left, which included the Democratic Left Alliance, Your Movement, and other small parties, received 7.5% of the vote but fell short of the 8% threshold for coalition. The new leftist party, Razem (Together), which did not join this coalition, received 3.6% of the vote but failed to clear the 5% threshold for parties (Markowski Citation2016).
5 The party system is based on an axis of “liberalism vs. solidarism,” which pitted the beneficiaries of the post-1989 economic and political transformation (supporters of Civic Platform) against those who felt that they had experienced a decline in their economic well-being or social esteem (supporters of Law and Justice). Law and Justice challanged not only the distributive consequences of the transformation, but also the post-1989 liberal-democratic political order itself, directing its message at cultural traditionalists (Tworzecki Citation2019).
6 Civic Platform was initially classified as a liberal conservative party. Over time, it expanded the centre-left faction within the party, and is now often discussed in centrist terms.
7 This is a rough approximation of the types of representation based on party membership, yet, individual women deputies tend to diverge from the party’s stance occasionally.
8 Bill no. 216, 1 February 2016, Sejm Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej.
9 In 2019, child benefits were extended to the first child regardless of family income.
10 Journal of Laws, 2016, item. 195, 11 February 2016.
11 Research Ethics Approval No. MR/16/17-447.
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Anna Gwiazda
Anna Gwiazda is Reader in Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London. She is currently conducting research on women’s political representation and gender equality, and has published in this field in Politics & Gender, Democratization, International Political Science Review and the Journal of Legislative Studies. In the past, she researched the quality of democracy and published ‘Democracy in Poland’ with Routledge. She also conducted research on political parties and the Europeanisation of public policies.