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Abstract
The relationship between welfare states and women's representation in parliaments has been of great interest to scholars. However, different strands of the literature on gender and political representation suggest opposing directions of causality. On the one hand it is argued that a rise in welfare spending increases women's representation in parliaments, but on the other hand, more women in parliaments is said to expand welfare spending. This paper analyses the problem empirically and finds that the lagged values of women's parliamentary representation are better predictors of welfare spending than the lagged values of spending are of women's per cent in parliaments. In other words, women make the welfare state and welfare spending does not make female representatives.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at doi:10.1080/00344893.2017.1300599
Notes
1. A list of countries and some descriptive data is provided in the .
2. Because the estimation of structural equation models is based on the variance–covariance matrix of all variables included in the model, the covariation between all pairs of variables either have to be included in the model, otherwise they are assumed to be zero.
3. Cees (van der Eijk et al. Citation2007) used SEM in a similar manner when studying the reciprocal effects of subjective economic evaluations and government support.
4. The RMSEA is recommended for samples larger than 200, in smaller samples the index can be high and we risk rejecting the model too often. The opposite is true for the chi square test, which rejects the model too often when sample size is above 200. As the sample here is just around 200, both indices are shown. See Schumacker and Lomax (Citation2004: 100) and Bowen and Guo (Citation2012: 141–6) for more details.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mirjam Allik
Mirjam Allik received a PhD in political science in 2013 from Trinity College, Dublin. She currently works as a data scientist at the Urban Big Data Centre at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include deprivation and income inequalities, gender inequalities, elections, and quantitative methods. The author has previously published papers in Health and Place (on measuring deprivation), East European Politics, and Electoral Studies.