Mulit-level Representation of Women – representative claim-making in the European Commission and the German Länder

In this paper, I compare the representative claim-making of members of sub-national governments in three German Länder (states) and Commissioners of the European Commission, with a focus on claims to represent women. Both political levels, sub- and supranational, are often seen as subordinate to the national political arena and receive less media attention. However, the German Länder and the European level both have important legislative competences, which makes them critical actors for the representation of women. On the one hand, the European Commission is the non-majoritarian organisation at the core of the policy-making processes of the European Union (EU). Over time, the Commissioners have extended their competences beyond its “watchdog of the treaties” and “agent of the member states” function. With Juncker’s “Political Commission” and growing public demand for exercising quasi-governmental and representative functions, the college of Commissioners has evolved its roles from a technocratic to a political actor. Yet, the representative functions of the European Commission remain understudied. On the other hand, Länder governments are themselves political actors with limited legislative competences, which exceed those of the European Commission. In addition, Länder governments are influenced by partisan polarisation, election-cycles, and office-seeking career politicians. In this paper, I argue that the claim-making patterns in the European Commission have evolved to become similar to those in sub-national governments, which is an indicator for the politicised role of the Commission. This poses challenges to the gender-mainstreaming of the Commission´s actions. To approach the representative performances by (quasi) governments on both levels, I draw from Representative Claim theory, measuring claim-making and claim content. I develop four expectations, two for sex dependent differences in the claim-making behaviour, and two for the influence of party polarisation. First, women Commissioners are more likely than men to claim to represent women or their interests. This because of shared identities and experiences, as well as the motivation to represent women in the still masculinist political systems. Second, the topics of representative claims voiced by women and men are substantially different, because the portfolios of Commissioners and Ministers are gendered – with women Commissioners/Ministers more often assigned to “feminine” portfolios or topics. Third, Ministers in the German Länder are likelier to issue representative claims in policy areas, which lie within Länder-competences, whereas the European Commissioners follow their gender-mainstreaming approach and use representative claims also to strengthen the EU´s integration dynamics beyond their competences. Last, partisan polarisation on gendered issues predicts claim-making only on the sub-national level, as ministers take active part in elections, are office-seeking, and are not bound by a club spirit of unanimity, as is the college of Commissioners. I test these hypotheses by applying a representative claim analysis to a corpus of speeches by European Commissioners and Länder-ministers, as well as quantitative content analyses. Doing so contributes to the literature on women´s representation in multi-level political systems, the representative behaviour of women and men in office, and empirical analyses of representative claim-making by (non-)elected representatives in politicised institutions.