Beyond Floor Time: How Gender Shapes Informal Legislative Interactions in the European Parliament

Parliaments are gendered institutions. Yet, existing research in this field has largely concentrated on formal aspects, such as electoral institutions, floor time, or committee assignments of women and men in parliament. With a few exceptions, however, we know much less about the gendered nature of parliamentary interventions, which constitute a more spontaneous and informal, yet understudied way for legislators to interact with one another during parliamentary debate. Drawing on an original data set of all parliamentary interventions in the European Parliament, the so-called blue-card questions, from 2009 to 2024, this paper investigates how gender shapes both the patterns and the style of these interactions. First, using exponential random graph models for network analysis, I examine whether legislators are more likely to interrupt the debate following contributions from women legislators than men legislators. Second, by employing language models for text analysis, I study whether the style of interventions varies depending on the gender of the interacting legislators, focusing on the tone and the degree of hostility. The findings advance our understanding of the gendered nature of legislative behaviour by moving beyond formal ways of participation as well as the role and function of informal parliamentary interventions.