QUALREP: The Quality Of Women's Political Representation

实现妇女的平等政治参与和代表权已被国际社会正式确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实现政治平等。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，她们的代表性远远不够。此外，这些都是“困难时期”：我们面临着潜在的破坏性自然和人为危机（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质疑代议制民主应对这些问题的价值，而且经常提出反女权主义和反性别的主张，威胁妇女权利，破坏两性平等。需要提供证据，说明妇女如何以及何时在政治中有充分的代表性，以代表国内和全球行为者维持必要的政治意愿，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为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。为了满足这一需要，欧洲妇女代表大会对比利时、英国、波兰、葡萄牙和瑞典五个欧洲国家的妇女政治代表的质量进行了理论丰富、比较经验的分析，注意到她们的跨部门和意识形态多样性，特别关注最边缘化的妇女。在这样做的过程中，它制定了一个概念框架和方法，适用于未来对不同民主国家的全球研究，可以帮助确定高质量妇女政治代表性的特点和条件，为促进政治内外性别平等的宣传和决策提供必要的证据基础。

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 andmarginalised 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.