Parliaments through a (gender) lens: video analysis as a feminist method

Gender-sensitive parliaments, feminist institutionalism frameworks and gender and politics scholarship have been foundational in exploring and capturing the gendered constitution of parliaments and legislatures. Methods have been steadily and reflexively refined over time to explore gendered parliaments, such as inter alia parliamentary ethnography (Crewe, 2014; Brown, 2018; Miller 2021; 2022), interviews (Ahrens and Elomäki, 2023); documentary analysis; and audio analysis (Dietrich et al 2019) The above developments have also corresponded with increased televising (Soroko et al 2013) and digitalisation of parliamentary proceedings. Digital transformations were dramatically accelerated during the Covid pandemic (Mencarelli, 2021). Many research and parliamentary interactions have moved online, such as online interviews, video-conferencing, and social media analysis. One valuable resource, pre-dating this acceleration is videos of parliamentary proceedings. These constitute an invaluable (a)synchronous resource to explore key activities of parliaments, such as deliberative accountability in committees, using nonverbal signals (Schondthardt-Bailey, 2022). Parliaments’ televised and digital transformations have, arguably, not yet been wholly caught up with, yet, by gender and politics scholars and integrated into their methodological toolkits (cf Dietrich et al, 2019). This paper asks: what can (and cant) videos tell us about the gendered nature of parliaments and what are the conceptual and methodological possibilities to go about such analyses? To answer these questions, the paper aggregates existing scholarship; explores conceptual and empirical links between gender-sensitive parliaments, feminist institutionalism, and video analysis and draws on experiences of coding four videoed sessions of the newly established EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, using computer assisted software. Based on this analysis, the paper finally considers broader questions about gender, televised and digitalised proceedings and democracy.