Male Dominance in the New Democracies of Central and Eastern Europe: Institutional Origins and Mechanisms of Reproduction

The over-representation of men has been an enduring feature of the politics of Central and Eastern Europe: currently, over 75% of the MPs in the region are men. The scholarship on post-communist Europe has focused on the establishment of male dominance largely in relation to women’s under-representation (Waylen 2007, Walsh 2011). While the existing scholarship does offer some clues as to how men came to be over-represented in the first place, there has been virtually no discussion of how, once established, male dominance has been reproduced over time. Yet, the question of reproduction is particularly interesting within the context of the post-communist region, not in the least because male over-representation in politics has become so deeply entrenched over the past twenty-five years. The paper draws on historical-sociological institutionalism in order to identify (1) how male dominance was established in the first place and (2) the mechanisms of reproduction responsible forthe perpetuation of male dominance in the politics of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. It draws on Mahoney’s work on path dependence (Mahoney 2000) in order to argue that (1) male dominance was well-established long before the collapse of communism via the informal institutions of the anti-communist opposition and the formal institutions of the party state; and (2) male dominance was reproduced over time in several ways: (a) in functional terms, via the separation between ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’; (b) in terms of power, via incumbency in political office; and (c) in terms of legitimation, via the party system’s incorporation of dominant norms of representation that were either gender blind or predicated on men's roles as representatives of the new democratic order. The paper concludes with an examination of the mechanisms of change of male dominance, most notably electoral system reform and quotas.