Gendered Parliaments and Institutional Disputes: Abortion, Budgets, and Women’s Representation in South America

Abstract

This panel foregrounds parliaments as key arenas where gender conflicts are articulated, negotiated, and institutionalised in South America. Drawing on parliament studies and feminist institutionalism, it examines how legislative outcomes are shaped not only by party competition and formal rules, but by discursive practices, informal norms, and the strategic work of networks that connect chambers to courts, civil society, and state bureaucracies. Abortion politics is treated as a revealing parliamentary struggle: a high-salience issue that structures coalition-making, agenda control, and patterns of advance and rollback across countries, while exposing why similar mobilisations can generate divergent legislative results. The panel also highlights parliamentary action beyond roll-call votes—showing how women’s representation operates through speech and framing, through the allocation of public resources via budgetary amendments, and through institutional enforcement of inclusionary rules. Together, the papers illuminate how parliaments can function simultaneously as bottlenecks, battlegrounds, and levers for gender equality—and how democratic quality is shaped by what legislatures enable, tolerate, or foreclose.

Title	Details
Pioneers in Political Representation: The Role of Women through the Discourse of Chilean Parliamentarians (1953-1973)	View Paper Details
Advances and Setbacks in South America: Gender Disputes in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia	View Paper Details
Redistribution of Brazil's Budget by Women Federal Deputies: An Analysis Based on Mandatory Individual Budgetary Amendments (2022–2025)	View Paper Details
Between the streets and the parliament: the legalization of abortion in Brazil and Argentina	View Paper Details
Courting Descriptive Representation	View Paper Details