Gender Differences in Ministerial Careers in Subnational Cabinets. Evidences from Spain, Belgium and United Kingdom

Our proposal addresses the influence of multilevel politics in women’s recruitment and circulation in parliamentary cabinets. There is an increasing literature on the role of social structural, ideological and political factors explaining the recruitment of women in cabinet positions, although subnational politics remain very much unexplored. While in a previous paper (Rodríguez & Dandoy 2014), centred on the Spanish case, we showed that multilevel settings may enhance the circulation of members between both national and regional layers, this paper proposes to apply a comparative view in order to test the influence of factors dealing with institutional differences and national contexts on gender recruitment in regional cabinets. In particular, we aim to observe the effect of these factors on career paths, duration and exits across regions and countries. Our paper employs data from 1980 to 2015 from all national regional cabinet appointments in Spain, Belgium and United Kingdom.