We investigate the effect of women's political representation in the state legislative assembly and public administration on natural disaster mortality in 20 Indian states from 1981 to 2019. The paper combines two critical dimensions: political and administrative representation of women and disaster risk reduction. Results suggest that women's political representation reduces total disaster mortality after controlling socioeconomic and political covariates; however, the effects are statistically insignificant for the current and lag periods. We find that a one standard deviation increase in women's representation in public administration lowers total disaster mortality by 20.6 percentage points, which is 9.8 per cent of the sample mean. We observe the impacts of female administrative representation on gender-specific human development outcomes through reduced male and female disaster mortality, and we explain some mechanisms. Thus, women's political and administrative representation is crucial for addressing disaster mortality as it has major public health consequences.

I argue that the use of elected political representatives undermines the political equality of citizens. Having elected representatives politically stand-in for individual constituents makes ordinary citizens the political inferiors of their representatives. This in turn creates democratically problematic social inequality between elected politicians and their constituents. I then offer an alternative to representative politicians that does not face the avatar of the people problem: representative mini-publics. Through these bodies, we can achieve a representative system without a class of political elites, where citizens share the responsibilities and powers of government as equals.

We study a new driving factor of women's inclusion in politics: the economic empowerment of their mothers. We evaluate Swedish microdata on politicians and their parents over fifty years. The results demonstrate a strong intergenerational dynamic from mothers to daughters. Female politicians come from households where their mother is more likely to be employed, earns more in the labour market, and earns a larger share of household earnings. This pattern was strong among parliamentarians in the 1970s and 1980s when female numerical representation increased rapidly in Sweden but is not present in national politics after the introduction of gender quotas in the early 1990s or in local politics.

This study draws together theories of women’s substantive representation and research on politicians’ knowledge of constituent preferences. We ask whether politicians are better at predicting their constituents’ policy preferences when they share the same gender. In doing so, we contribute to knowledge about the mechanisms underlying substantive representation. Using original surveys of 3,750 Canadians and 867 elected politicians, we test whether politicians correctly perceive gender gaps in their constituents’ policy preferences and whether women politicians are better at correctly identifying the policy preferences of women constituents. Contrary to expectations from previous research, we do not find elected women to be better at predicting the preferences of women constituents. Instead, we find that all politicians — regardless of their gender — perform better when predicting women’s policy preferences and worse when predicting men’s preferences. The gender of the constituent matters more than the gender of the politician.

In recent years, the rising number of LGBTIQ+ politicians across the world has been matched by an increase in academic attention on which factors foster or hinder their careers. Here, we provide a comprehensive analytical review of the relevant literature, with the goal of illustrating both its synergies and imbalances. We show that most of the existing evidence specifically concerns LGBTIQ+ politicians' electoral performance. Moreover, this knowledge has largely been produced in very similar contexts politically and socioculturally. Finally, we highlight the potential of investigating a number of additional factors that may impact LGBTIQ+ political careers, such as intersectional dynamics that may have a differentiated impact within this population. Future works could expand the scope of this literature by considering these elements and focussing more on the direct experience of LGBTIQ+ politicians.

While women's political inclusion is central to international conflict resolution efforts, public attitudes in conflict states towards women's political inclusion remain understudied. We expect insecurity to depress support for female political leadership in conflicts where women's political inclusion is violently contested. Citizens wanting security through force prefer male leaders because of stereotypes privileging men's military prowess. However, citizens wanting security through reconciliation also favour men for fear that female leadership would provoke more violence. We assess these expectations with experimental and observational data from the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In the survey experiment, priming respondents to think about insecurity decreases support for female leadership, but only among women. In observational data, insecurity correlates with more polarized attitudes towards women's political representation in some regions and greater support for female leaders in others. Insecurity's impact on public support for female leadership in conflict states may be highly heterogeneous.

Policies that promote the common good may be politically infeasible if legislators representing ‘losing’ constituencies are punished for failing to promote their district's welfare. We investigate how varying the local and aggregate returns to a policy affects voter support for their incumbent. In our first study, we find that an incumbent who favours a welfare-enhancing policy enjoys a discontinuous jump in support when their district moves from losing to at least breaking even, while the additional incremental political returns for the district doing better than breaking even are modest. This feature of voter response, which we replicate, has significant implications for legislative politics generally and, in particular, how to construct politically feasible social welfare-enhancing policies. In a second study, we investigate the robustness of this finding in a competitive environment in which a challenger can call attention to a legislator's absolute and relative performance in delivering resources to their district.

L'article évalue l’état de la représentation substantive des femmes, des individus moins éduqués, moins fortunés, des jeunes ainsi que des allophones en politique provinciale québécoise. La représentation des citoyen(ne)s par les partis politiques est conceptualisée selon trois types de congruence idéologique: 1) le parti étant idéologiquement le plus proche des citoyen(ne)s; 2) le parti pour lequel les citoyen(ne)s ont voté; et 3) le système partisan. Nous évaluons ces formes de représentation face à cinq dimensions structurant la politique québécoise, permettant ainsi une approche multidimensionnelle à la représentation : l'axe souverainiste-fédéraliste, l'axe gauche-droite, les dépenses sociales, les dépenses en environnement, ainsi que l'immigration. Nos résultats présentent un portrait complexe de la représentation. Bien que certains groupes apparaissent moins bien représentés (en particulier, les femmes et les individus moins éduqués) aucun groupe ne l'est de façon systématique, et certains groupes sont parfois même avantagés (en particulier, les jeunes).

Several recent studies have found unequal policy responsiveness, meaning that the policy preferences of high-income citizens are better reflected in implemented policies than the policy preferences of low-income citizens. This has been found mainly in a few studies from the US and a small number of single-country studies from Western Europe. However, there is a lack of comparative studies that stake out the terrain across a broader group of countries. We analyze survey data on the policy preferences of about 3,000 policy proposals from thirty European countries over nearly forty years, combined with information on whether each policy proposal was implemented or not. The results from the cross-country data confirm the general pattern from previous studies that policies supported by the rich are more likely to be implemented than those supported by the poor. We also test four explanations commonly found in the literature: whether unequal responsiveness is exacerbated by (a) high economic inequality, (b) the absence of campaign finance regulations, (c) low union density, and (d) low voter turnout.

Extant literature argues that ethnic minority representation in plurality systems will benefit from the presence of sizable co-ethnic populations. I argue that the threshold for election depends not only on a minority population's group size but a district's level of segregation. I show that residential segregation can facilitate the increased representation of ethnic minority populations. Contrary to the prevailing literature, however, I find that increased segregation levels in cities with sizable minority populations decrease the percentage of co-ethnics elected to office. I support this argument with evidence from an original dataset on the local representation outcomes of Muslims in England between 2011 and 2021, which covers 434 district council elections. Using threshold modelling, I introduce the concept of the population threshold, above which increases in segregation level decrease Muslim representation. This article contributes to the electoral geography literature on ethnic minority representation.

This article has two objectives. One is to explain the rise of female political representation in local assemblies in Tokyo's 23 Special Wards. The other is to examine how political women in Japan have or have not changed since the publication of Susan Pharr's Political Women in Japan in 1981. When Tokyo first saw the emergence of a new type of local assembly women in the 1990s, they consisted of well-educated suburban housewives who led the Seikatsusha Nettowaku movement. In the past 15 years, however, Tokyo has witnessed a decline in ‘housewife politicians’ and a further diversification in the types of political women. This article pays special attention to a new type of political women called Mama Giin (literally, mommy politicians). Mama Giin are professional working mothers, who have become local assembly women to address deficiencies in childcare services. Their numbers increased as socio-economic changes and party realignment reshaped supply and demand for female candidates in Tokyo. Most of them accept the gendered responsibilities for childcare very much like Pharr's New Women did in the 1970s. The younger cohorts of highly educated women enjoy greater job options and life choices unavailable to the New Women of their mothers' generation. However, they do not necessarily challenge Japan's patriarchy. This article examines the biographies of female local politicians in Tokyo's 23 Special Ward assemblies to understand the rise of Mama Giin.

This article focuses on the role of unionised members of parliament. While unions have a direct effect on the labour market via wage negotiations, they often also take part in political debates. In many countries, significant shares of the members of parliament are also members of a trade union. However, up to now little empirical evidence is available on the extent to which unionised members of parliament try to achieve union-specific goals and thereby influence the macroeconomic conditions of an economy. A recent study for Germany comes to the conclusion that union members in the Bundestag cannot be seen as the parliamentary arm of the trade unions. However, we present contradicting empirical results by showing that, in Germany at least, the degree of unionisation of parliamentary members has a negative impact on economic growth and increases inflation, while unemployment remains unaffected.