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

自1995年以来，40多个国家通过了强制妇女参与政府的立法，这些政策得到了国际组织、政治家和活动家的大力支持。寻求增加妇女任职人数的从业人员之所以这样做，很大程度上是因为他们相信，这将通过改善政策代表性为妇女提供规范性的好处。尽管这一假设被广泛接受，但很明显，在一些情况下，增加妇女代表人数并不能改变立法议程。虽然在一些国家，妇女更多的参与改变了政策代表性--在本项目中定义为通过与妇女利益有关的立法--但在另一些国家，增加女性立法者只产生了有限的影响。为什么增加妇女的参与会导致如此喜忧参半的结果？该项目是第一批系统努力之一，以认真发展和检验关于何时以及为什么增加妇女在国民议会中的存在会导致对妇女问题的更多关注的理论期望。本文提出了一系列经验意义，可用来评估妇女出席立法会议与妇女政策代表情况之间经常发现的相关性(或缺乏相关性)。这些可观察到的影响被用来确定妇女在办公室的人数增加何时会导致政策通过。研究设计结合了对通过与妇女问题有关的立法的跨国统计分析和对妇女在英国工党中的代表性的定性案例研究。鉴于一直致力于增加妇女在国民议会中的人数的关注和资源，阐明妇女任职与立法关注妇女问题之间的关系是一个及时的项目，具有明显的政策影响。通过说明并不是所有的机构环境都有利于妇女参与和代表之间的联系，它有助于解释女性立法者未能改变立法议程的情况。对于致力于加强对妇女问题的关注的政策行为者，理论框架还提供了确定妇女更多参与可确保其政策代表性的案例的标准。因此，在质疑妇女任职人数与关注妇女利益之间的假定联系时，该项目就增加妇女任职人数是否对立法成果“重要”提出了更为微妙的解释。

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.