Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: When Women Matter: Exploring Theoretical Links Between Women Descriptive and Substantive Representation

政治学博士论文研究：当女性重要时：探索女性描述性代表与实质性代表之间的理论联系

• 批准号: 1024388
• 负责人: Matthew Gabel
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2011-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1024388&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

Since 1995, over 40 countries have adopted legislation that mandates women's participation in government, and these policies enjoy considerable support from international organizations, politicians, and activists. Practitioners who seek to increase women's presence in office do so in large part because they believe it will provide normative benefits for women through improved policy representation. Despite this widely held assumption, it is clear that in a number of cases increasing women's representation fails to transform the legislative agenda. While in some countries women's increased participation alters policy representation-defined in this project as the adoption of legislation related to women's interests-in others the addition of female legislators has had only limited consequences.Why does increasing women's participation lead to such mixed results? This project represents one of the first systematic efforts to carefully develop and test theoretical expectations concerning when and why increasing women's presence in national assemblies leads to greater attention to women's issues. A series of empirical implications are developed that can be used to assess the correlations (or lack thereof) that are often found between women's presence in legislative assemblies and instance of women's policy representation. These observable implications are used to establish when increases in women's presence in office cause policy adoption. The research design combines a cross-national statistical analysis on the adoption of legislation related to women's issues with a qualitative case study of women's representation in the Labour Party of Great Britain.Given the attention and resources that have been dedicated to increasing the number of women in national assemblies, elucidating the relationship between women's presence in office and legislative attention to women's issues is a timely project with obvious policy implications. By illustrating that not all institutional settings facilitate the link between women's participation and representation, it helps to explain instances where female legislators fail to transform the legislative agenda. For policy actors committed to increasing attention to women's issues, the theoretical framework also provides criteria for identifying cases in which women's greater participation may secure their policy representation. Thus, in challenging the presumed link between the presence of female representation and attention to women's interests, the project provides a more nuanced interpretation as to whether increasing the number of women in office "matters" for legislative outcomes.

自1995年以来，有40多个国家通过了规定妇女参与政府的立法，这些政策获得了国际组织，政客和激进主义者的大力支持。 试图增加妇女在职的从业者在很大程度上是因为他们认为这将通过改善政策代表来为妇女提供规范的利益。 尽管有这一广泛的假设，但很明显，在许多案件中，增加妇女代表并未改变立法议程。 尽管在某些国家，妇女的参与增加改变了该项目的政策代表，因为采用了与妇女利益有关的立法，但女性立法者的加入只会有限。为什么增加妇女的参与会导致这种不同的结果？ 该项目是仔细发展和测试有关何时以及为什么增加妇女在国民议会中的存在以及为什么会导致人们对妇女问题的更加关注的第一个系统努力之一。 开发了一系列的经验含义，可用于评估妇女在立法议会中的存在与妇女政策代表的实例之间经常发现的相关性（或缺乏）。 这些可观察到的含义用于确定何时增加妇女在办公室的存在导致政策采用。该研究设计结合了关于通过与妇女问题相关的立法的跨国统计分析结合了对妇女在大不列颠工党中的代表性的定性案例研究。赋予了致力于增加国民议会中妇女人数的关注和资源，从而阐明了妇女在办公室中的关系和立法对妇女问题之间的关系，这显然是一项临时政策。 通过说明并非所有的机构环境都促进了妇女的参与与代表的联系，它有助于解释女性立法者未能改变立法议程的实例。 对于致力于越来越关注妇女问题的政策行为者，理论框架还提供了确定妇女更大参与可能确保其政策代表的案件的标准。 因此，在挑战女性代表的存在与对妇女利益的关注之间的假定联系时，该项目对增加职位上的妇女数量是否增加了立法结果的妇女人数更为细微。