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Gendering Gamson's Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2020

John A. Scherpereel Open the ORCID record for John A. Scherpereel [Opens in a new window] ,
Melinda Adams Open the ORCID record for Melinda Adams [Opens in a new window]  and
Katherine Hayes
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Abstract

Which factors explain variation in the gendered composition of governing cabinets? To address this question, we transpose the idea of proportionality between legislative seat shares and cabinet seats shares from studies of the partisan composition of cabinets to studies of the gender composition of cabinets. Gamson's law identifies a strong association between the proportion of legislative seats a party contributes to a governing coalition and the proportion of seats the party receives in the cabinet. We attempt to gender Gamson's law. We develop a theory of why a gendered Gamson's logic should apply to cabinets in parliamentary systems. We test our intuition via analysis of a new dataset covering 18 OECD parliamentary systems from 1990 through early 2019. We find a strong relationship between the gendered distribution of seats in governing parties’ parliamentary delegations and the gendered distribution of seats in the cabinets those parties create.

Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 775 - 798
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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