In this paper we compare institutional responses to violence against women in politics in two national legislatures: Canada and the United Kingdom. As global ‘early adopters’, both countries have developed relatively new rules that deal explicitly with harassment in politics. In 2014, the Canadian House of Commons became one of the first legislatures in the world to do so when it introduced a new sexual harassment protection policy for parliamentary staffers of MPs. The next year, it adopted a new MP-to-MP Code of Conduct on Sexual Harassment and in 2018, the legislature passed a law extending sexual harassment protections to all federal employees (Collier and Raney 2018). In July 2018, the U.K. Parliament adopted an Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme to address bullying and harassment in British politics and a few months later, Dame Laura Cox released a report on bullying of House of Commons staff. Using a feminist institutional lens, we comparatively evaluate these institutional responses to VAW-P (violence against women in politics). We pay particular attention to the ways that each of these Westminster-style parliaments has defined the problems of violence and harassment, the institutional mechanisms and actors involved in these changes, and to how parliamentary culture and norms— both formal and informal— either inhibited or contributed to positive gendered change in these two cases. Even in similar institutional settings, we find that legislative action taken on VAW-P to date varies across spaces and time particularly in its effectiveness and substantive responsiveness to women. This paper contributes to the broader global dialogue on VAW-P by revealing how pre-existing power hierarchies and gendered rules embedded within political institutions can work to undermine efforts to make legislatures safer workplaces for women across parliamentary contexts.
