Gender and Parliamentary Seniority: Power and Precarity Across Western Parliaments

Gender gaps in parliamentary seniority persist across Western democracies, even as many legislatures have moved closer to gender parity. This raises a central question for gender and politics scholarship: why do formal gains in descriptive representation not translate into equal institutional authority? This article examines how seniority operates as a gendered informal institution that structures access to authority inside contemporary parliaments. Drawing on 100 in-depth interviews with parliamentarians in France, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom, we analyze how the mechanisms linking seniority to authority are constructed and experienced in everyday parliamentary work. We conceptualize seniority not merely as tenure, but as a relational status that confers epistemic authority, confidence, and autonomy while simultaneously producing personal costs and forms of precarity. Parliamentarians describe how remaining in office is associated with the erosion of social ties, pressures on family life, and growing dependency on political work — burdens that are not equally bearable across gendered and social positions. We show that the processes through which seniority becomes authoritative and gendered vary across institutional contexts, shaping women’s and men’s opportunities to convert presence into power. By theorizing these cross-context mechanisms, the article advances feminist institutionalist scholarship on political institutions as gendered, highlights the care and social reproduction costs of political authority, and contributes to broader debates on democratic equality and the limits of formal parity in turbulent times.