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"Political representation"
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Are Female Political Leaders Role Models? Lessons from Asia
Despite vast research on women's descriptive representation, little is known about its influence on women's political engagement in East and Southeast Asia where gender norms are different from those in other parts of the world. I theorize that the discrepancy between women's political and social rights in the region makes it difficult for women to envision themselves as equal to their male counterparts. Thus, women are less reluctant to play a \"man's game\" even when they see female political leaders. Using a multilevel model with data from the Asian Barometer Survey and various additional sources, I examine the impact of female parliamentarians in the region and find that they significantly reduce women's political participation. My results suggest that the female legislators' role model effect found in existing literature on Western democracies does not apply to East and Southeast Asia. Instead, female political leaders generate a backlash effect on women's political engagement. This research raises implications for the role of context in the effectiveness of women's symbolic representation and calls for further exploration on the connection between women's symbolic and descriptive representation.
Journal Article
Ideological representation : achieved and astray : elections, institutions, and the breakdown of ideological congruence in parliamentary democracies
Ideological congruence is the term generally used in comparative politics for the representative relationship between the general preferences of citizens and the perceived and stated position of government. This study provides a systematic comparative assessment of success and failure in achieving ideological congruence in nineteen developed parliamentary democracies from 1996 through to 2017. It then deconstructs the processes through which elections can connect citizens and governments into the three major stages: citizens' votes in parliamentary elections; the conversion of those votes into legislative representation; the election of prime ministers by their parliaments and the appointment of cabinet ministers. Analyzing these three stages shows that average distance from the median citizen increases at each stage, with only a few remarkable recoveries once congruence begins to go astray.
Book
The Expertise Paradox: How Policy Expertise Can Hinder Responsiveness
We argue that policy expertise constrains the ability of politicians to act on voter preferences. Representatives with more knowledge and experience in a given domain have more confidence in their own issue-specific positions. Enhanced confidence, in turn, may lead politicians to discount opinions they disagree with, producing a distorted image of the electorate. Two experiments with Swedish politicians support this argument. First, officials are more likely to dismiss appeals from voters in their areas of expertise and less likely to accept that opposing views may represent the majority opinion. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, in a second experiment we show that inducing perceptions of expertise increases self-confidence. The results suggest that representatives with more specialized knowledge in a given area may be less capable of acting as delegates in that domain. The study provides a novel explanation for variations in policy responsiveness.
Journal Article
The Long Shadow Cast by Communism over Women’s Political Representation
Why do democratization and gender quotas help to empower women politically in some countries, but not in others? This article addresses the question both theoretically and empirically by recognizing the role of historical legacies, and it contributes to the literature by analyzing the contested legacy of communism in women’s political representation. The main theoretical argument of the article focuses on post-communist politicians’ and citizens’ hatred toward everything that reminded them of the communist era after the collapse of the system, including the “woman question.” These politicians and citizens resisted legislative quotas and other pro-women democratic measures, viewing them as Soviet artifacts and symbols of top-down, state-forced women’s liberation. Therefore, ceteris paribus, exposure to communist rule in the past might reverse or nullify the otherwise positive effect of democratization and gender quotas on women’s political empowerment. This hypothesis is tested empirically using a comprehensive sample of 116 countries spanning the years 1991–2015. The findings indicate that the communist past does indeed overshadow the well-established positive influence of democratization and gender quotas upon female political empowerment. A comparative exploration of post-communist Poland and the Czech Republic illustrates the argument further and allows consideration of additional explanatory factors.
Journal Article
Electoral systems and political context : how the effects of rules vary across new and established democracies
\"This book highlights how new and established democracies differ from one another in the effects of their electoral rules\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Voting against Women: Political Patriarchy, Islam, and Representation in Indonesia
We examine cultural and ideological barriers to gender equality in a young democracy, Indonesia, where women’s political representation has increased slowly since democratization, but where survey results point to declining support for women’s political leadership. In both country and comparative literature, the effect of ideological factors—including religion—on voter support for women candidates is contested. Using results of a nationally representative survey, we group respondents according to a “political patriarchy” index. We find that being a Muslim is a strong predictor of holding patriarchal attitudes; university education is associated with gender-egalitarian views. Patriarchal views, in turn, are associated with opposition to increasing Indonesia’s gender quota and with lower levels of self-reported voting for female candidates. Our findings suggest that patriarchal attitudes drive both policy preferences and voter behavior. We conclude that Indonesia’s recent conservative Islamic turn likely underpins widespread—and increasing—opposition to gender equality in politics.
Journal Article
War, Revolution, and the Expansion of Women’s Political Representation
Women’s political rights and their exercise of political citizenship globally have often expanded more rapidly in times of conflict, crisis, and revolution. The decline of empires after World Wars I and II and the creation of new nations served as a catalyst for the expansion of women’s suffrage. Civil wars and revolutions have had similar outcomes in expanding women’s political citizenship. This essay brings together several disparate literatures on World War I, World War II, wars of independence, revolution, and post-1990 civil wars and expands their scope to show how women’s political rights and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often been linked to conflict. In doing so, I highlight a notable pathway by which rights expansions occurred: conflict led to changes in the political elite and ruling class, resulting in the necessity to rewrite constitutions and other rules of the polity. During these critical junctures, women’s rights activists gained opportunities to advance their demands. The context of changing international gender norms also influenced these moments. I consider two key moments in the worldwide expansion of political citizenship: the struggle for women’s suffrage and the struggle to expand women’s representation in local and national representative bodies.
Journal Article