Does women’s descriptive representation matter for policy preferences? The role of political parties

Abstract

Although the presence of women has been increasing in several parliaments around the world, we still do not know much about the consequences that their presence has for policy representation. Relying on a rich comparative dataset on prospective MPs’ policy preferences in 12 countries and 87 political parties collected between 2006 and 2012 within the Comparative Candidates Survey, this article aims to understand how political parties interplay with prospective MPs’ sex to affect the latter’s policy preferences. Our results show that the descriptive representation of women makes a difference for policy representation, (i) mainly (though not only) when issues that particularly affect women are at stake and (ii) only concerning issues around which political parties do not yet have settled positions (i.e. uncrystallized issues). There are therefore empirical grounds to support an imposed representation of minority groups to deal with issues that are new on the political agenda.