Research on the substantive representation of women continuously highlights the importance of women's presence as a condition for substantive representation. Recent literature has highlighted the variation that institutional context can play in this dynamic. While the distinction between proportional and majoritarian institutions has been helpful, the context of mixed systems has been neglected. This paper studies how the implementation of a mixed member system can create distinct patterns of a division of labour in MP's representation of women's interests according to their gender and whether they have a proportional or SMD seat. To do so, I create a novel, active language dataset with topic classification using a fine-tuned state-of-the-art NLI classifier covering all speeches in the New Zealand parliament between 1945-2017. I quantitatively analyse this with the R package design-based supervised learning (DSL) method to determine how topical focus on women's interest policies has shifted as a result of the electoral reform that replaced the SMD system with a mixed member system in 1996. In addition, I complement this data with elite-interviews with members of the New Zealand parliament.
I utilize insights from feminist institutionalism that argues that institutions have both explicit and implicit patterns of gendered expectations and that there are differences in how men and women interact with these institutional expectations. I argue that expectations come from the stated motivations and expectations of the reform itself as well as from new representational cues generated by the proportional list. These norms limit women's representation to the representatives elected through list mandates, and to women in particular. This implies that not only will legislators elected through lists increase their representation of women's interests, but majoritarian legislators will, on average, reduce their focus on women's issues, regardless of gender. This paper contributes to our understanding of how electoral institutions shape legislators' tendencies to substantively represent women.
