The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments
The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments

Author: Lena Wängnerud

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-10

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1317623053

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Gender serves as a lens that makes visible important issues in the field of representation: Whom do elected politicians represent? What is at stake in the parliamentary process? What do we know about the interplay between parliaments and the everyday lives of citizens? It is widely understood that women’s presence in government matters but we need to understand the conditions under which it matters more clearly. Using Sweden as a case study, a country where the number of women elected to the national parliament has steadily risen since the 1970s, Lena Wängnerud presents a novel approach on which characteristics inside a parliament help translate physical representation into substantive representation for women. Using three guiding principles: (i) the implementation of equal opportunities for women and men to influence internal parliamentary working procedures; (ii) the creation of room for women’s interests and concerns on the political agenda; and (iii) the production of gender-sensitive legislation, Wängnerud shows what are the necessary conditions for women’s needs, interests, and concerns to be adequately integrated into parliamentary processes. The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments book adds fuel to all these classical debates within the field of political representation and will bring attention to a wider audience on why electing women matters.

Women in Parliament
Women in Parliament

Author: Julie Ballington

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13:

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This updated edition of Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers Handbook covers the ground of women's access to the legislature in three steps: It looks into the obstacles women confront when entering Parliament be they political, socio-economic or ideological and psychological. It presents solutions to overcome these obstacles, such as changing electoral systems and introducing quotas, and it details strategies for women to influence politics once they are elected to parliament, an institution which is traditionally male dominated. The first Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers handbook was produced as part of IDEA's work on women and political participation in 1998. Since its release in English in 1998, there has been an ongoing interest and demand for the handbook, and responding to the request for the translation of the handbook, IDEA has produced Spanish, French and Indonesian language versions and a Russian overview of the handbook during 2002-2003. Since the first handbook was published, the picture regarding women's political participation has slowly changed. Overall the past decade has seen gradual progress with regard to women's presence in national parliaments. This second edition incorporates relevant global changes in the past years presenting new and updated case studies.--

Performing Representation
Performing Representation

Author: Shirin M. Rai

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0199093857

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Seven decades after India’s independence women members occupy 1 in 10 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. In analysing women’s limited presence in the Indian Parliament, Performing Representation breaks new ground in scholarship on gender and politics. It explores the possibilities and limits of parliamentary democracy and the participation of women in its institutional performances. This book offers new insights into the gendered nature of the performance, aesthetics, and norms of parliamentary life through an examination of electoral data, legislative debates, and life stories of women MPs. The authors avoid both the framing of women MPs either simply as challengers of masculinized institutional politics or only as docile actors in a gendered institution. Making a strong case for taking parliamentary politics seriously in these times of populism, the book raises critical questions about the politics of difference, claim-making, representation, and intersectionality and addresses these as part of global feminist debates on the importance of the women’s representation in political institutions.

Representing Women?
Representing Women?

Author: Mercedes Mateo Diaz

Publisher: ECPR Press

Published: 2024-10-31

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1910259861

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This work discusses questions on political participation, representation and legitimacy in the European Union national parliaments. Three major empirical questions structure the book: What affects women's presence in parliaments?, Does the number of women in parliament have an effect? And are women in parliament representing women Empirical evidences show that institutional reforms need a 'minimal environment' in terms of socio-economic development so as to prove effective. As opposed to the critical mass theory, claiming that a few representatives cannot have an impact on the political outcomes, here the empirical evidences suggest that smaller groups can also influence the different components of the legislative process. The last part turns to the fundamental question of whether a parliament that is descriptively representative, i.e. in which the parliamentarians share certain characteristics with the voters, also is a substantively descriptive parliament, i.e. in which the parliamentarians mirror the voters' opinions. Evidence suggests that the electoral system's level of proportionality influences the extent to which assemblies socially and ideologically mirror their population. The book ends by advancing new hypotheses and setting up guidelines for future research.

Gendering the Everyday in the UK House of Commons
Gendering the Everyday in the UK House of Commons

Author: Cherry M. Miller

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 3030642399

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This book explores the reproduction of gender ‘beneath the spectacle’ – that is, beneath ceremonial displays of power, in the UK House of Commons. Contributing to a fascinating literature on gender and parliaments, the book conceives of the House of Commons as a workplace, as well as a representative arena. It explores the everyday consequences for gendered power relations that this unique environment entails, as parliamentary actors perform their careers, citizenship, and public service. The book firstly explores ways to conceive of and to study gender in parliaments. Parliamentary ethnography – that is, spending time observing and engaging with parliamentary actors, is presented as an unparalleled methodology to better understand gender, power, and agency. The chapters that follow provide in-depth portrayals of gender and the parliamentary workplace. The book connects multiple actors in the House of Commons: MPs, officials, parliamentary researchers, and the (in)formal rules that structure the relationships between them.

Violence Against Women in Politics
Violence Against Women in Politics

Author: Mona Lena Krook

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 019008846X

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Women have made significant inroads into political life in recent years, but in many parts of the world, their increased engagement has spurred attacks, intimidation, and harassment. This book provides the first comprehensive account of this phenomenon, exploring how women came to give these experiences a name: violence against women in politics. Tracing its global emergence as a concept, Mona Lena Krook draws on insights from multiple disciplines--political science, sociology, history, gender studies, economics, linguistics, psychology, and forensic science--to develop a more robust version of this concept to support ongoing activism and inform future scholarly work. Krook argues that violence against women in politics is not simply a gendered extension of existing definitions of political violence privileging physical aggressions against rivals. Rather, it is a distinct phenomenon involving a broad range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors, taking physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic forms. Incorporating a wide range of country examples, she illustrates what this violence looks like in practice, catalogues emerging solutions around the world, and considers how to document this phenomenon more effectively. Highlighting its implications for democracy, human rights, and gender equality, the book asserts that addressing this issue requires ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure women's equal rights to participate--freely and safely--in political life around the globe.