Conservatism, Conservative Parties and Women’s Political Representation

It appears that we may be entering a ‘conservative moment’. Across many western democracies there are concerns that governments, of both left and right, are responding to the global economic crisis with neo-liberal policies that further reduce the size and role of the state. Such policies are considered not only to disproportionately impact on women but also to negatively affect women’s rights and equality. In so doing they may herald a return to more traditional bifurcated gender roles, with a reassertion of a strong public/private divide. Women’s Policy Agencies, if not already abolished, are also seemingly under threat. Concerns over multi-culturalism and security compound these developments, as populist responses to the ‘war on terror’ and immigration are frequently played out on and over women’s bodies, not least over veiling. At the same time, conservative women looked to have increased their presence in politics, whether as elected representatives, political leaders, or as organized participants in civil society. These conservative women frequently make claims to represent women. Feminists might recoil from the idea of conservative women like, Margaret Thatcher, Jenny Shipley, Kim Campbell, Angela Merkel and Sarah Palin, as representatives of women. But, pre-emptively dismissing conservative representatives, on the grounds that they are either falsely conscious, or are but ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ - where claims and acts that unintentionally or intentionally harm women’s interests are disguised as claims in favour of women - cannot lead to good research. Rather, gender and politics scholars should take conservatism and conservative representatives more seriously. This requires a reconsideration of our conceptual, analytic and empirical frameworks. A smattering of individual research outputs on conservatism and conservative parties and policies and women’s representation has been published in the last few years, but, hitherto, there has been no systematic consideration of the meaning and challenge of conservatism and conservative representatives to extant understandings of gender and political representation. To do all this demands, moreover, that our analytic frameworks and research designs are capable of including conservative women and their representative claims.