Covid-19, democracy and gender in the European Parliament

The European Parliament constitutes a unique transnational parliament often charactersed as a working rather than a debating parliament. The MEPs meet in two locations Brussels and Strasbourg for plenaries, committee meetings and political group meetings and travel long distances to their home countries and constituencies. The Covid-19 pandemic transformed the ways in which the parliament functioned as a democratic and a potentially gender sensitive institution. Whilst the parliament has a strong gender equal reputation both in terms of descriptive and substantive representation, recent scholarship has pointed to remaining gender inequalities within the institution showing that democratic representation continues to be gendered and women and men’s political work is shaped by their gender. In this paper, we ask: How were democratic representation and participation affected by the pandemic and with what gendered effects? How gender sensitive was the European Parliament in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic? Using theories of democracy and gender sensitive parliaments we look at how the EP represented women’s voices during the pandemic and how the pandemic shifted the spaces for policy deliberation, as well as how the EP took the gendered impacts of the pandemic into account in its legislative work and parliamentary scrutiny in relation to the EU-level response measures. Specific themes include assessing the functioning of the spaces where gender sensitive policies are normally done (e.g. the FEMM committee) and whose voice and perspectives was heard in plenary discussions about Covid-19. Our data consists of MEP interviews, key EP reports and plenary debates on Covid-19, and committee and political group documents.