Marian Sawer

Parliamentary Representation of Women: From Discourses of Justice to Strategies of Accountability

The 1990s have witnessed a wide range of initiatives at national and international levels to increase the parliamentary representation of women. It is argued here that the “underrepresentation of women” is an inherently ambiguous slogan that has wrapped up in it quite different families of arguments, including the right to represent, the need for representativeness, and the representation of interests. This ambiguity is politically powerful but may cause problems for the practice of representation. The article concludes that “making a difference” discourse may lead to an over-emphasis on embodiment and a neglect of issues of accountability.

Governing for the Mainstream: Implications for Community Representation

In this paper I begin by examining the role of extra-parliamentary institutions of representation within Australian democracy. I suggest that such institutions are an important supplement to majoritarian political institutions in ensuring that ‘weak voices’ are heard in the policy process. I then look at the impact of the Howard government on such extra parliamentary forms of community representation, drawing parallels with contemporaneous developments in Canada. I find that changes were in fact initiated under Labor governments, seeking to impose managerialist models on community-based representation. The further controls introduced by the Howard government have, however, seriously reduced the capacity of community-based peak bodies to represent their constituencies. These constraints create the danger of a less inclusive democracy, where the voices of those outside the mainstream can be ignored or misrepresented.

Australia : the fall of the femocrat

During the 1970s there was a conjuncture in Australia of women’s movement mobilization, a political tradition of ‘looking to the state’ to promote social justice and the election of reforming governments. Women’s movement activists promoted the need for government machinery to ensure the needs of women as well as of men were recognized and addressed in all areas of policy. Quite sophisticated policy responses were developed to the new ways in which the women’s movement was framing policy problems. The United Nations (UN) drew on the Australian model as an example of good practice and international researchers drew attention to the distinctive ways in which the Australian women’s movement had operated through the state to achieve gender-sensitive policy and the funding of feminist services (e.g. Eisenstein, 1996; McBride Stetson and Mazur, 1995).

Misogyny and misrepresentation: Women in Australian parliaments

Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was sworn into office in 2010. In 2012 she was driven to make a powerful speech on misogyny, which reverberated around the world. This research note explores the circumstances prompting the Prime Minister’s speech and argues that the arrival of a woman Prime Minister helped bring into the open the gendered nature of politics. At a more formal level, sexist commentary focused on issues such as the Prime Minister’s decision to be ‘deliberately barren’. On talkback radio and the internet, sexual vilification took on more sexualized and violent forms. Increased awareness of the hostility being expressed about women in public life led to a feminist counter-campaign in 2012 using social media. In addition to the main argument, data is presented about the representation of women in Australian politics and the way that this has recently declined. It shows that electoral victories by parties that do not use gender electoral quotas have been largely responsible; Australia slipped from 15th to 45th place in the Inter-Parliamentary Union ranking for representation of women in national parliaments between 1999 and February 2013. The renewed attention to gender in politics is unlikely to halt this slippage in the short term.

What makes the substantive representation of women possible in a Westminster parliament? The story of RU486 in Australia

This article explores institutional and other factors facilitating the substantive representation of women in parliament. It engages with a range of indicators of substantive representation, including process/responsiveness indicators, legislative/policy outcomes and attitudinal alignment of women representatives and women in the community. It presents an Australian case study of a successful initiative by a cross-party group of women parliamentarians to facilitate access to the abortion drug RU486. It finds that critical mass, critical actors and a critical juncture were important but so was institution-building, particularly the under-studied role of parliamentary groups.

The impact of feminist scholarship on Australian political science

The discipline of political science has remained male dominated in most parts of the world. Women have organised within political science associations both to raise the status of women in the profession and to try to transform the discipline. This article is a personal account of the 25‐year history of the Womens Caucus of the Australasian Political Studies Association and its successes and failures. While the status of women in the profession has improved and the journal has become more gender inclusive, the impact of feminist scholarship on political science curriculum remains patchy. Space has been made for gender scholarship and a chapter added to textbooks and disciplinary histories, but the approach is additive rather than transformative. One contributing factor may be increased fragmentation of the discipline.

‘The women's lobby’: Networks, coalition building and the women of middle Australia

The ‘womens lobby’ or the ‘powerful feminist lobby’ has been held responsible for a range of evils including the undermining of the traditional family, public expenditure on community services, social engineering and the imposition of ‘political correctness’. To what extent is there a ‘womens lobby’ working from inside or outside government to influence public decision‐mating? In this paper we explore this question, using data from a social network analysis of the Australian womens movement conducted in 1992–3. Our findings are that there is a large, very loosely connected network of organisations engaging in advocacy on behalf of women. Density of ties is less than is found in a comparable study of the Canadian womens movement but there are more ties between non‐government groups and government agencies. Issues of organisational philosophy have inhibited the development of a ‘peak body’ for the non‐government womens movement and led to reliance on issue‐specific coalitions. Latterly, awareness of in...

Wearing your Politics on your Sleeve: The Role of Political Colours in Social Movements

This article provides evidence of the significance of political colours and associated emblems in the repertoires of social movements and related political parties. It argues that political colours play an important role not only as visual symbols of the cause but also in the emotional life of social movements. Political colours help to create and sustain collective identities and illustrate the role of affect in political life. The article includes a case study of the role of colours in the womens movement, showing how one set of first-wave organizational colours took on much broader symbolic meanings during the second wave of the womens movement. It provides evidence from both the first and second waves of the womens movement of the emotional meaning of the colours for activists. The case study also illustrates the contestation over public memory that occurs in relation to powerful symbols.

Down with Elites and Up with Inequality: Market Populism in Australia and Canada

There is a rich comparative literature on Australian and Canadian politics but relatively little comparing political discourse, despite the election in both countries of governments promising to ‘govern for the mainstream’. This article presents a comparative analysis of market populist discourse as articulated by the Howard and Harper governments, using a conceptualisation of market populism that draws on work by Thomas Frank. The article examines the origins and vectors of this discourse, its adaptation to local circumstances and the way it mobilises resentment against so-called ‘elites’ and ‘special interests’ associated with the welfare state and with the intermediary institutions of representative democracy.

Women Acting for Women

In the new country of Timor-Leste, women constituted in 2011 32 per cent of the parliament, a relatively high figure in the world and in the region. But to what extent has the presence of women in parliament contributed to progress towards gender equality? In this article we argue that the passage of a parliamentary resolution on gender-responsive budgeting in Timor-Leste was an act of substantive representation, and we draw on a range of data to examine what made it possible. We find that while ‘newness’, international norms, womens movement unity, womens machinery in government and parliament and networks linking them were important, it was the development of a cross-party parliamentary womens caucus that was crucial to success. The role of gender-focused parliamentary institutions in supporting critical actors has rarely been examined in the literature on substantive representation. This is in contrast to the rich literature on institutions such as womens policy agencies. Our study suggests that more focus on parliamentary institutions is needed to discover what enables women parliamentarians to become critical actors.