Women’s Legislative Behavior under Authoritarianism: Sponsoring and Co-Sponsoring Bills in Three Arab Autocracies

Studies exploring the link between women’s numerical presence in legislative bodies (i.e., descriptive representation) and their policy contributions to the groups whom they represent (i.e., substantive representation) have flourished over the past decades. While most studies have found evidence that women’s interests and priorities differ from their male counterparts and advocated the need for increased political representation for women and other marginalized groups, other work has highlighted the myriad effects played by factors such as political context (Mackay, 2008), partisanship, internal power dynamics, electoral incentive structure (Höhmann, 2019) and legislators’ personal characteristics (Bratton 2005) that may complicate the nature/substance of representation. Interestingly, despite the proliferation of studies exploring the role of women in power in established and developing democracies, research on the role played by women in the legislative arena in MENA and other undemocratic settings remained largely unexplored. This paper aims to shed light on the link between women’s descriptive and substantive representation in authoritarian legislatures. It focuses on analyzing an important aspect of women’s substantive representation: bill proposals. Building on a rich dataset of sponsored and co-sponsored bill proposals (n=1,100) posed by legislators between 2010-2015 in three Arab autocracies: Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, the findings demonstrate stark gender differences–both within and across cases. Female legislators tend to pay increased attention to areas related to women’s interests compared to their male counterparts, however, this is not necessarily the case in all countries under study. Data show that political context, electoral rules and other electoral incentive structures play an important role in shaping female legislators’ behavior.