Female Prime Ministers and Discursive Institutionalism

As “first among equals” Prime Ministers are uniquely positioned in their countries to shape the discourse regarding women and girls. They set the cabinet’s, and by extension the parliament’s, agenda and these executive and legislative branch activities are then transmitted to the public through the media and responded to by impacted interest groups, agencies, and citizens. Thus what Prime Ministers do, and do not, say about women’s needs can be expected to ultimately have a significant political impact in any given democracy. Vivien Schmidt defines discourse as “whatever policy actors say to one another and to the public in their efforts to generate and legitimize a policy program” (Schmidt, 2002, 210). Discourse is important both at what Schmidt calls the “coordinative” level (policy makers talking to one another) and at the “communicative” level (policy makers selling their ideas to the general public). In this paper I generate hypotheses as to how having a female, rather than a male, Prime Minister can be expected to shape coordinative discourse regarding gender issues, outline a research design for testing these hypotheses, and offer an empirical plausibility probe based on the Prime Ministerships of Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark in New Zealand to investigate them.