Institutional Rules, Intra-Party Competition and the Parliamentary Activity of Women MPs: Evidence from Belgium

Although the descriptive representation of women has improved across established democracies during the past decades, political institutions are often still criticized for being ‘gendered’, i.e. for maintaining problematic inequalities between male and female office-holders (Lowndes, 2019). In the specific context of parliament, research has for instance shown that women and men emphasize different topics in their legislative agendas (e.g. Schwindt-Bayer, 2006; Taylor-Robinson & Heath, 2003), that women MPs get to take the floor less often than their male counterparts, and especially during ‘hard-policy’ debates, covering topics that are commonly linked to men’s stereotypic strengths and interests (e.g. Bäck, Debus & Müller, 2014; Bäck & Debus, 2019). Still, much remains unknown about whether these differences result from actual discrimination (i.e. women are ‘pushed’ towards ‘soft-policy’ topics because of the general conceptions among politicians, party elites and voters alike about the appropriate behavior for female MPs ) or rather from shared social identities (i.e. following Phillips’ (1995) politics of presence, women have a distinct set of interests and they deliberately choose these topics). Drawing on a novel and extensive dataset of parliamentary activity in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives (1995-2019), this paper examines how often and on which topics female and male MPs ask parliamentary questions (PQs) and whether potential gender differences in the behavior of MPs are contingent upon the institutional rules and the degree of intra-party competition associated with particular PQs. We distinguish between several types of PQs and hypothesize that gender differences (in terms of women asking less PQs, both in general and on ‘hard topics’ in particular) are larger with regards to questions where party groups act as formal gatekeepers and intra-party competition is large (e.g. mediatized and popular plenary PQs) compared to questions that result from MPs’ individual prerogatives and thus are associated with less competition (e.g. written PQs). As such, this paper provides important insights into the gendered and behavioral effects of formal parliamentary procedure. Moreover, it sheds light on the ‘free choice vs. coercion’ controversy with regards to women’s substantive focus of parliamentary work.