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Beyond critical mass: Gender effects in social networks of German state MPs

Gender
Parliaments
Political Parties
Social Media
Jan Bucher
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Jan Bucher
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Abstract

When Dahlerup (1988) introduced the concept of a critical mass (CMT) in gender ratios for social groups to political science, her conclusion was to go beyond the ratio and look for critical acts. Yet, pinning both action and research to this simple number of 30 percent were too tempting, as Childs and Krook (2006) note. Recently, questions of representation and gender effects in different politcal arenas have been scrutinized using CMT, for example recently for instruments like parliamentary speeches (Bäck and Debus 2019) or parliamentary questions (Devroe 2021), and in general scholars tend to combine CMT with extended inquiries. This contribution contrasts studying gender ratios of and in parliamentary groups with questions of critical acts between their members, choosing social media as arena of research. Using a relational research design and method, enables us to ask relational research questions: Do female and male MPs tweet alike? Does gender influence their retweet behavior? And will they be retweeted equally? The analysis surveys representation on Twitter of the members of German state parliaments (MPs). Using the 16 state parliaments (Landtage) as venue enables a research design that holds most cultural and societal variables stable, while introducing variance in the assemblies when it comes to the composition of parliaments and especially the parliamentary party groups (PPGs). This work presents a new data set of 973 Twitter accounts by 1731 members of all German state parliaments in 2021 and their subsequent Tweets and retweets. The analysis is prepared using quantitative inferential network analysis. This research informs subsequent work on representation of MPs on Twitter and can be read as argument of focusing more on representation within the PPGs. It presents a novel base model for the German case and discusses a possible application of the analytical framework for a cross national and European perspective. It also lays the groundwork for further relational inference.