“Equality is a cross-party thing”: party-cohesion and consensus-building around gender equality in the French National Assembly

The French National Assembly, like many other parliaments, is known for its strong party cohesion. When we listen to the MPs in the plenary, however, they tend to state that, on issues related to gender equality, discipline is not necessary. As they imply, these issues would be, almost by nature, consensual. This contribution questions what lies behind this idea of consensus. Using a set of interviews, archives and roll-call vote-analyses, we show that the idea of consensus on these issues, far from describing an objective reality, is more a series of performative statements that aim to normalize what is in effect, for some MPs, quasi-systematic indiscipline. This idea of consensus, however, is also weaponized by these undisciplined MPs to obtain the re-building of party cohesion around their position, through calls to loyalty, or blackmail. Relying on a neo-institutionalist framework, we highlight the different ways voting behaviours around gender equality issues are symbolically framed and reframed to fit different understandings of party loyalty. We advocate in favour of understanding legislative work as an activity that is also deeply symbolic, and argue that more attention should then be drawn to parliamentary rules as objects of negotiation rather than imposition.