Semiotic Political Violence Against Women in Latvian Politics

This chapter, part of a wider book project examines aspects of harassment or violence with female Members of Parliament (MPs) during political campaigns or while serving in the Latvian parliament, the Saeima. Online abuse is a common form of psychological violence, involving threats and trolling that forces women MPs to reduce their social media engagement (Krook 2020). I use data from political ethnography in the Saeima, interviews with MPs, and a content analysis of social media posts to determine if female candidates have encountered different aspects of violence, harassment, or intimidation in their political lives. I conducted 38 interviews with female members of parliament 17 of 22 female MPs in the 12th Saeima and 26 of 31 female MPs in 13th Saeima, an 80% response rate. Despite strong laws on gender-based violence Latvia does not have any specific provisions in place to deal with violence against women in politics. I compare the Latvian case with the different forms of violence against women that can used strategically to silence and limit the work and voices of female members of parliament including physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic violence (Krook 2020). I will focus on specific examples of violence from MPs and former MPs in their own words discussing different types of incidents they experienced and also the ways that women MPs normalize violence as a part of politics. The Latvian case provides a new look at violence against in East European politics. The Saeima is an important institution to examine political violence because it is the most powerful political institution in Latvia, though public opinion suggests that it was one of the most untrusted of Latvia’s political institutions. The 2018 parliamentary elections were a watershed year for women in Latvian politics where women’s descriptive representation increased in parliament from 18% to 31% in one election. Consequently, Latvia is a critical case because women’s representation is above the European average and analyzing two convocations descriptively demonstrates a before and after case study comparison for the impact of the increased gender equality on political violence. It also ranks 11th in the Global Gender Gap Report (World Economic Forums 2020), has had four female speakers of the Saeima, and it is one of the few countries in the world to have both a female head of state and government making it an important and underutilized case for gender and politics research.