The role of women’s organizations: from lobbying for descriptive to substantive representation?

Political parties are gendered institutions where formal and informal rules shape political participation differently for men and women. Within political parties, women’s organizations have long been the most visible space where women party members are mobilised. Moreover, women’s organizations are also the main actors that articulates women’s interests and try to influence the party’s agenda. Women’s organizations were especially influential in the end of the twentieth century, but their relevance now has been questioned. Especially since parties increasingly value descriptive representation of women. However, as more than half of European political parties still have women’s organizations, this suggests that these groups have not disappeared. Instead, their role may have changed. This paper examines how women’s organizations within parties have adapted to the normalisation of descriptive representation. Existing research on the role of women’s organizations offers competing expectations: some argue that women’s organizations provide crucial arenas for agenda-setting and intra-party lobbying, while others warn that separate organizational structures risk marginalising women’s interests (ghettoisation). However, studies on the role of women’s organizations are limited, especially regarding the interests they promote. To address this gap, this paper analyses the lobbying behaviour of women’s party organizations by examining the motions they submitted to national party conferences between 1990 and 2020 in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. By coding both the volume and content of motions, as well as co-sponsorship, the analysis traces whether and how women’s organizations shifted their focus from increasing women’s numerical presence to advancing gendered policy priorities. Moreover, we can test the success of their strategies: are their motions adopted? Lastly, as there is a wide variety of parties in the dataset, this allows us to study how partisan ideology shapes the substantive agendas of different women’s organizations. This paper thus offers the first systematic, comparative account of the substantive representation strategies of women’s organizations within political parties, contributing to ongoing debates about gendered political parties and intra-party dynamics.