QUALREP: The Quality of Women's Political Representation

实现妇女平等的政治参与和代表权已被国际社会正式承认为一项关键的全球优先事项，但人们越来越认识到，代议制民主未能为所有妇女提供政治平等。在世界民主国家中，妇女，特别是少数民族和边缘化妇女的代表性不足，远远没有得到“良好”的代表。此外，这是一个“乱世”：我们面临着潜在的毁灭性的自然和人为危机（气候变化、全球流行病、经济不平等和不安全）。民粹主义的兴起不仅对代议制民主的价值提出了质疑，而且经常利用反女权主义和反性别的主张来应对这些问题，这些主张威胁到了女性的权利，破坏了性别平等。需要有证据表明，不同类型的妇女如何以及何时在政治中得到充分代表，以维持代表国内和全球行动者的必要政治意愿，以反对反民主和反性别平等的思想和做法；并使政治和民间社会行动者能够在妇女与民主政治之间建立真正的关系，从而充分实现妇女的政治平等。该计划对五个欧洲国家的妇女政治代表的质量进行了理论上丰富的比较经验分析，注意到她们的交叉和意识形态多样性，并特别关注最边缘化的妇女，从而解决了这一需要：比利时；英国;波兰;葡萄牙和瑞典。在此过程中，它开发了一个概念框架和方法，适用于未来在不同民主国家进行的全球研究，可以帮助确定高质量妇女政治代表的特征和条件，为倡导和制定政策提供必要的证据基础，促进政治和其他领域的性别平等。

Achieving women's equal political participation and representation is formally recognised as a key global priority by the international community, yet there is enhanced recognition that representative democracy has failed to deliver political equality for all women. Descriptively under-represented in the world's democracies, women, especially minoritised and marginalised women, experience something far short of 'good' representation. These are moreover 'troubled times': we face potentially devastating natural and human-made crises (climate change, global pandemics, and economic inequality and insecurity). The rise of populism not only contests the value of representative democracy to respond to these but does so frequently by deploying anti-feminist and antigender claims that threaten women's rights and undermine gender equality. Evidence outlining how and when women in their diversity are well represented in politics is needed to sustain the necessary political will on behalf of domestic and global actors to counter anti-democratic and anti-gender equality ideas and practices; and to enable political and civil society actors to build genuine relationships between women and democratic politics, whereby women's political equality is fully realised. QUALREP redresses this need by conducting a theoretically rich, comparative empirical analysis of the quality of women's political representation, attentive to their intersectional and ideological diversity and with particular concern to the most marginalised women, across five European nations: Belgium; Britain; Poland; Portugal and Sweden. In so doing, it develops a conceptual framework and methodology applicable in the future to global research across diverse democracies that can help establish the features of, and conditions for, high quality women's political representation providing an essential evidence base for advocacy and policy making that advances gender equality in politics and beyond.