The Impact of Women's Group Lobbying on the Representation of Women in Canadian Parliamentary Debate

Recent research from Canada has shown that women legislators, regardless of party affiliation, are more likely than men to speak for women in parliamentary debate (Rayment 2024, McCallion 2024). But this gives us a partial understanding of the quality of women’s political representation since it focuses exclusively on elite representatives, rather than on the relationship between representatives and those they represent. Parliamentary responsiveness to the needs and interests of women in society is essential for the effective representation of women in politics (Celis and Childs 2020). Extra-parliamentary women’s groups, advocating for a wide range of women’s issues, stake representative claims on behalf of women in the political sphere and serve an important bridging function between women in civil society and political institutions. Drawing on a framework that conceives of women’s political representation as a relational process between elected officials and those they represent, we hypothesize that parliamentarians who meet with women’s group lobbyists will be more likely to represent women by speaking about them in parliamentary debate. We draw on publicly available lobbying contact records from 2008 to 2025 to identify the number of women’s group lobbying meetings each parliamentarian engaged in over this period. And looking at parliamentary debate transcripts over the same period, we use computational text analysis to identify speeches about women’s issues based on the density of mentions of women and related issues in each speech – a technique developed in previous research (Rayment 2024) – and identify the number of speeches about women each parliamentarian makes. We then use multivariate regressions to assess the relationship between meeting with women’s group lobbyists and the number of speeches about women parliamentarians make, controlling for parliamentarians’ sex, party affiliation, and parliamentary role. These models allow us to test our expectation that parliamentarians who have more contact with women’s groups will be more likely to champion their issues in legislative debate. The analysis shows whether and to what extent the lobbying efforts of women’s groups are taken up in legislative debate by the parliamentarians with whom they meet, and it helps us to understand the individual- and institutional-level factors that affect women’s political representation. These findings will offer insight on parliamentarians’ responsiveness to the needs and interests of women in society, as mediated by women’s group advocates. It will also help identify networks of critical actors – both within parliament and outside it – who are actively engaged in the process of women’s political representation.