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Party Control, Intraparty Competition, and the Substantive Focus of Women's Parliamentary Questions: Evidence from Belgium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2022

Benjamin de Vet Open the ORCID record for Benjamin de Vet [Opens in a new window]  and
Robin Devroe Open the ORCID record for Robin Devroe [Opens in a new window]
Benjamin de Vet
Affiliation:
Ghent University
Robin Devroe
Affiliation:
Ghent University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Parliaments are still often criticized for being gendered—that is, for maintaining problematic inequalities between male and female officeholders. While research highlights how female members of parliament (MPs) take the floor less often than men, especially during debates on “hard” policy domains, much remains unknown about the role that political parties play in fostering such differences. Drawing on a novel data set on the use of parliamentary questions in Belgium (N = 180,783), this article examines gendered patterns in the substantive focus of MPs’ parliamentary work. It confirms that differences in the issue concentrations of male and female MPs exist, but they are larger when access to the floor is more restricted and party control is stronger. Our findings yield important insights into the gendered side effects of parliamentary procedure and shed some light on the “choice versus coercion” controversy with regard to women's substantive focus of parliamentary work.

Keywords

genderparliamentary behaviorparliamentary questionsintraparty competitionpolitical partiessubstantive representation
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 247 - 271
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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