Can she do the job? Empirical evidence for uneven legislative oversight activities of MPs towards women and men ministers

Legislative oversight stands at the center of the relationship between parliament and government, but how ministers’ characteristics incentivize MPs to oversee some more thoroughly than others, did not yet received scholarly attention. This paper contributes to closing this research gap by answering the question as to what degree and why the oversight activities of MPs are shaped by the sex of ministers. We argue that MPs control women ministers more tightly than their men colleagues, because stereotypes about women’s inability to govern continue to shape the subconscious perception of women ministers by parliamentarians and MPs perceive women as less trustworthy and predictable than men ministers. To test this proposition, we study original data for the number of questions of MPs to ministers in three European countries. The analysis focuses on instances of ministerial change between men and women within the same cabinet to uncover how the behavior of MPs adapts with the sex of the minister in charge and applies a vector auto-regressive model. Our results suggest that MPs oversee women in government more thoroughly than men, albeit with some variation in the country context.