Gender stereotypes = gendered parliamentary behavior? Expanding the conceptual and empirical frontiers

Abstract

Do gender roles and gender stereotypes still produce gendered patterns of behavior in Western political institutions, despite the improvements in women’s descriptive representation? This panel offers new analytical and empirical insights. Rainbow Murray tackles this important question – which is an essential puzzle piece needed to strengthen our knowledge of gendered patterns of behavior in legislative settings – with the help of rich parliamentary debate data from the French Parliament. Daniel Höhmann identifies the determinants affecting male politicians’ attitudes and preferences towards women’s issues. In [their] novel approach, Höhmann analyzes the correlations between the Big Five personality traits and male politicians’ attitudes to women’s issues among elite politicians in Switzerland and Germany. Next, Jan Bucher asks when do female politicians tweet, a natural follow up to the growing literature on gendered speech making. Jan uses impressive, original data of 973 Twitter accounts by 1731 members of all German state parliaments and finds that low descriptive representation of women has an adverse effect on their Twitter activity. Finally, in an intersectional feat, Shardia Briscoe-Palmer focuses on parliamentary debates to understand the ways Black masculinities are rendered both invisible and hyper-visible within parliamentary debates in the British House of Commons. She finds that Black men are seldom mentioned at all and – in those cases they are mentioned – it is in connection to crime, deaths in custody or rioting. These representations construct black masculinity as associated negativity, violence, crime, and anti-social behavior, which reinforces the existing racial stereotypes and inhibit substantive representation of Black men’s interests. Finally, Anna Mahoney discusses data about 52 Black women who have navigated the raced and gendered institution (Hawkesworth 2003) of Congress since 1969. Moving beyond stereotypes, the descriptive data collected by Mahoney, Brown and Clark will illustrate the heterogeneity among Black Congresswomen themselves as well as how these marginalized legislators are navigating and shaping U.S. Congress. She introduces the team’s research agenda, placing Black Congresswomen at the center including fundamental questions about how institutions operate and how political elites respond to the change norms and practices of these institutions. Overall, the authors argue that this descriptive data will prompt new questions for legislative scholars and expand conceptual and empirical frontiers, since discilinary norms and assumptions may need revision in light of Congress’ increasing diversification.

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Learning from the Black Women of the US Congress: A Research Agenda	View Paper Details
A “Civilizing Influence”? The Impact of a Growing Proportion of Women on Parliamentary Debates	View Paper Details
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Privileged Bodies, Silenced Voices - an intersectional analysis of the representation of Black masculinities in the House of Commons.	View Paper Details
When do women tweet? An inter-parliamentary, multi-level analysis of gender representation on Twitter	View Paper Details