Measuring Women’s Substantive Representation across Parties, Parliaments and Governments: Introducing the Substantive Representation Index

Substantive representation is a key constitutive element of democratic representative government. Yet, most comparative research on women’s political representation across parties, parliaments, and governments, focuses primarily on descriptive representation (Erzeel & Rashkova, 2021). This is problematic, because it is by now well-stablished that a focus on descriptive representation alone does not sufficiently and accurately account for patterns of gender equality in democratic representation (a.o. Celis et al 2008; Childs & Lovenduski 2013). This paper uses the Substantive Representation Index (SRI) developed recently by the authors (Rashkova & Erzeel 2021), to compare countries’ level of substantive representation of women systematically across time and space. The SRI combines two key dimensions of substantive representation (interest articulation and responsiveness) and 11 indicators (linked to activities by parties, parliaments, and executives, across different political echelons, and relying on multiple representative relationships) in one composite index. This paper presents the first effort to put the SRI to the empirical test. To do this, we use uniquely gathered data on the EU countries from 2000-2021. We identify patterns of countries with low, medium and high SRI, as well as different trends across periods, in order to explore variations in women’s substantive representation across Europe. Next, we also explore how SRI scores, and variations therein, relate to other macro-political factors (such as levels of women’s descriptive representation and gender equality, different consensus versus majoritarian democratic institutions, and political values and mass beliefs) and explain, via case study analysis, three representative cases.