The Politics of Inclusion in Crisis: COVID-19 and Women’s Executive Representation in Post-Communist Europe

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted political, social, and economic systems worldwide, raising new questions about gendered patterns of political representation and leadership. This paper examines how the pandemic affected women’s inclusion in executive cabinets across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), focusing on whether crises amplify or erode existing gender gaps in political power. Using an original time-series, cross-sectional dataset of cabinet compositions from 1992 to 2024, I employ generalized estimating equation (GEE) models to assess three dimensions of women’s representation: (1) the likelihood that a cabinet includes at least one woman, and (2) the overall percentage of female ministers, and (3) women’s presence in high-prestige ministerial portfolios. In addition, the analysis also considers the intersecting effect of radical right and populist parties, which became increasingly emboldened in the region during and after the pandemic. The analysis will reveal the extent to which governments in CEE maintained or retreated from gender equality norms under crisis conditions, revealing whether populist-led administrations exacerbated women’s exclusion from executive office or strategically incorporated women to project inclusivity. In doing so, the study contributes to broader debates on gender, populism, and crisis governance by showing how emergency politics and illiberal trends interact to shape women’s access to executive power.