Inclusion, Access and Voice: Women's Representation in Politics in Post-Communist Europe

Recent advances in the literature on women’s representation in politics have been informed by two major theoretical approaches: on the one hand, the ‘supply and demand’ model, and, on the other hand, Hannah Pitkin’s distinction between descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation. Scholarly work on Central and Eastern Europe has also primarily drawn on these two approaches. For instance, Matland and Montgomery’s comparative study tested the supply and demand model for candidate recruitment in post-communist Europe (Matland and Montogomery 2003), while Waylen’s feminist institutionalist analysis of gender in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America drew on the distinction between descriptive and substantive representation (Waylen 2007). The paper starts from the idea that, their considerable strengths notwithstanding, the two theoretical frameworks share one problematic assumption: that women’s participation occurs within a context where the institutions characteristic of representative democracies are already in place and function effectively. Yet, this was by no means the case in post-communist Europe, where representative institutions such as parliaments, executives and political parties only became consolidated over two and a half decades. I argue that we need to move beyond existing approaches by mapping women’s representation in post-communist Europe via three key concepts: inclusion, access and voice. Thus, the paper builds a theoretical framework around three questions: (1) to what extent were women included in the process of designing democratic institutions in post-communist Europe and what were the gender norms that informed these processes?; (2) how do electoral systems, party ideologies and party systems shape women’s access to political power in the region? and (3) do women as a group have a distinctive ‘voice’ in politics and what consequences does this have for gender policies? The paper provides a comparative analysis of six post-communist democracies: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.