Karen Celis

RETHINKING WOMEN'S SUBSTANTIVE REPRESENTATION

This article seeks to rethink how scholars have traditionally studied womens substantive representation. It outlines a framework that aims to replace questions like ‘Do women represent women?’ with ones like ‘Who claims to act for women?’ and ‘Where, how, and why does the substantive representation of women occur?’ Arguing that representation occurs both inside and outside legislative arenas, the article calls attention to the wide range of actors, sites, goal, and means that inform processes of substantive representation.

The Substantive Representation of Women: What to Do with Conservative Claims?

Recent developments in the gender and politics literature suggest that studying the substantive representation of women is much more complicated than counting the number of women present in a particular political institution and judging the actions of women representatives against a ‘feminist’ shopping list of demands. In brief, the substantive representation of women is no longer considered to be restricted to what happens in our parliaments or only by what women representatives do therein. Furthermore, what constitutes womens issues and interests – that which is to be represented – can also no longer be considered straightforwardly ‘out there’ to simply be acted upon by representatives; they are constructed as part of the representative process. Acknowledgement of the diversity and likely contested nature of claims to act ‘for women’ coincides with an emerging appreciation that the claims for women made by conservative representatives need to be brought more explicitly into our analytic frameworks and empirical studies. Together, these points not only undermine any assumption that the substantive representation of women equals the feminist substantive representation of women; they also raise the possibility of non- and anti-feminist representative claims and actions ‘for’ women. Against this backdrop, we review recent developments within the sub-field of the substantive representation of women literature and offer some reflections and suggestions about how to take conservatism seriously when studying the substantive representation of women both conceptually and empirically.

The Rise of Gender Quota Laws: Expanding the Spectrum of Determinants for Electoral Reform

The seminal work of Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems (1994), limits the definition of electoral reforms to those affecting electoral formulas, district magnitudes, assembly size, or electoral thresholds. Following this definition, studies on electoral reform have put political parties and their motivations at centre stage. Expanding the definition of electoral reform, however, requires a move beyond parties to explore the multiple possible sources of change. This article examines the most common reforms ofrecent years, electoral gender quota policies, and points to at least four explanations for the adoption of gender quota laws. Based on extensive data from gender quota campaigns, the article suggests that the literature on this topic would benefit from efforts to broaden the analytical focus to include the role of agency, group interests, anddiscursive struggles, and to call attention to the possibility of causal diversity by revealing different routes to electoral reform.

STUDYING WOMEN'S SUBSTANTIVE REPRESENTATION IN LEGISLATURES: WHEN REPRESENTATIVE ACTS, CONTEXTS AND WOMEN'S INTERESTS BECOME IMPORTANT

The lack of consensus regarding what the substantive representation of women means involves far reaching consequences for empirical research. This article illustrates some consequences of specific operationalisations of ‘the substantive representation of women’. It shows that, in order to understand the substantive representation of women, as it is performed by multiple representatives, empirical research needs to encompass a broad range of representative acts and contexts. It also benefits from including a wide conception of womens interests and womens perspectives.

Constituting Women's Interests through Representative Claims

The promotion of ‘women’s interests’ is a central focus and concern of advocates of women’s political representation. Examining the policy priorities and initiatives of female office-holders, existing research seeks to establish whether there are links between women’s presence and policy outcomes favorable to women as a group. Building on recent work critical of this traditional approach, this paper seeks in three key points to rethink the nature and process of political representation. First, it observes, dynamics of representation are not limited to elected bodies; rather, actors in multiple sites articulate policy demands. Second, in the course of their lobbying efforts, these actors make claims about who ‘women’ are and what ‘women’ want. Third, analyzing the multiple sources of claims-making highlights the need to distinguish between ‘women’s issues’ (a broad policy category) and ‘women’s interests’ (the content given to this category by various actors). The implications of this new approach are illustrated via four case studies, pointing to substantial within- and cross-case variations in the issues and interests identified as relevant to women as a group, as well as the actors claiming to act for women. On this basis, the paper concludes that ‘women’ and ‘women’s interests’ are constructed through, and not simply reflected in, political advocacy on their behalf.

On Substantive Representation, Diversity, and Responsiveness

When are “the people”—with all its different groups—represented? It is commonly accepted that democratic representation implies that no significant parts of the population are excluded from the right to vote or to stand for election and, similarly, that parliaments and even governments should, to a certain extent, mirror the represented and governed population. If authorization and accountability indicate the democratic quality of the formal dimension of representation (i.e., it is democratic when it is accountable), then representativeness allows for evaluating descriptive representation (i.e., it is democratic when it is representative of society) (see also Celis 2009). But what are our standards for judging the democratic quality of substantive representation? According to Hanna F. Pitkin, that normative standard is the representatives responsiveness: substantive representation is “acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them .” Responsiveness turns what representatives do into substantive representation of the demos . It is a metacriterion for democratic representation in the sense that accountability and descriptive representativeness need also to ensure responsiveness. But, again, questions arise: How should we understand responsiveness? How do representatives establish it? Where and when does responsiveness need to be established?

Power, privilege and disadvantage: Intersectionality theory and political representation:

This article critically reviews the extant literature on social group representation and clarifies the advantages of intersectionality theory for studying political representation. It argues that the merit of intersectionality theory can be found in its ontology of power. Intersectionality theory is founded on a relational conception of political power that locates the constitution of power relations within social interactions, such as political representation. As such, intersectionality theory pushes scholarship beyond studying representation inequalities – that are linked to presumably stable societal positions – to also consider the ways in which political representation (re)creates positions of privilege and disadvantage.

Regendering party politics: An introduction

This special issue – Re-gendering Party Politics – pays tribute to the 1993 classic book Gender and Party Politics (GPP), a collection of essays edited by Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris (Lovenduski and Norris, 1993). The aim of their volume was to explain how gender has affected party politics and how the imperatives of party politics influence the patterns of women’s political representation (Lovenduski, 1995: 3). The book offered ‘detailed and upto-date accounts of developments in 11 countries’ and demonstrated ‘the complexity of the party systems through which feminists are pursuing political change (Party Politics)’. GPP was rightly lauded in a review published in Political Studies for establishing ‘a significant framework for future research in this underdeveloped area of political study’. Organized by country specific chapters, GPP delivered rich accounts of women’s participation in the party political process (Political Quarterly). The introduction and conclusion augmented these, having already and comprehensively informed each chapter’s approach, to provide substantial systematic comparison – in this, it was regarded as a model ‘of what an edited collection of essays of this kind should be’ (Democratization). It is no over-exaggeration to say that it influenced the subsequent generations of politics and gender scholars, a resource many of us picked up as the first port of call and an early key text for the teaching of comparative gender and politics. Re-reading GPP, we are struck by just how much of the contemporary foci of gender and politics research – political recruitment and political careers, descriptive representation and gender quotas, substantive and symbolic representation, framing – were addressed back then in ways that revealed their interconnections rather than treating them as discrete areas of research. GPP has aged rather well. Lovenduski’s statement that (Lovenduski, 1995, cited in Krook and Childs, 2010: 83) ‘an implicit goal of feminist infiltration of parties is to secure changes in attitudes about gender, mainly by increases in understanding and awareness of gender differences and their implications for power relations’, made clear that women’s engagement with political parties was never just about the simple inclusion of women – the first dimension of feminization (Lovenduski, 2005) – but also about feminizing parties’ programmes and by implication governments, the second dimension of feminization. Diversity among women was acknowledged: Norris and Lovenduski write that ‘feminists have disagreed sharply about the nature of women’s interests’, reminding us that the recognition of women’s heterogeneity is not so very recent concern. Similarly, its reflections on the determinants of political change underpin the contemporary institutional turn (feminist and discursive) in gender and politics research. Women’s agency – or more precisely feminists’ agency – is centred (see Dahlerup and Leyenaar, 2013). As the review published in Democratization emphasized: ‘You [women] won’t get anything, if you don’t go on demanding it’. Encouragingly, GPP offered a rosy future with its ‘generally encouraging message, in highlighting women’s continuous, if uneven, political advance’. This special issue, coming some 20 years on, explores how gender continues to fundamentally shape the formal

Visible ethnic minorities in local political parties: a case study of two Belgian cities (Antwerp and Ghent)

The central concern of this article is the extent of political party commitments to the inclusion of ethnic minorities. The study of two Belgian cities and four parties shows a marked discrepancy between the efforts to include ethnic minority candidates and their level of inclusion in the local party structures as individual members, as party officials or as a party subdivision. A possible explanation is that political parties only promote the representation of ethnic minorities out of concern for their own electoral competitiveness, and not based on an unconditional commitment to the full political integration of ethnic minorities.

Good representatives and good representation

This article should be read as an ongoing dialogue between Suzanne Dovi and ourselves about a common concern: the quality of representation in general and, in particular, the good substantive representation for women (SRW). We strongly share Dovi’s concern that democratic institutions and processes can favor those in positions of power and can be used to dominate and oppress. We also are persuaded that for democracy to function well, a specific type of representative is required (Dovi 2007). The key difference between us is that Dovi’s focus (2002, 2007) is on the individual representative’s characteristics and qualities, whereas we turn our focus to the level of representative processes.