A Room of One's Own? Women’s Groups in Political Parties and Their Agency Capacity

While levels of women’s descriptive representation have steadily increased over time, feminist institutionalist scholarship has consistently highlighted the responsibility of political parties – as crucial gatekeepers to the political field – for the persistent underrepresentation of women, both descriptively and substantively. Political parties, like the societies in which they are embedded, are “sexist institutions” structured by gendered power dynamics that tend to marginalize women activists and constrain their political agency. Against this background, many parties have established women’s groups within their formal organizational structures, allowing women members and activists to organize around a shared gendered identity. Existing research and evidence suggest that the roles and relevance of these groups have varied considerably across party families and over time. They have alternately been described as marginal or symbolic bodies, or, conversely, as potential actors advocating for women’s descriptive and substantive representation within intra-party dynamics. Despite these contrasting assessments, women’s groups remain an under-researched feature of party organization, particularly with regard to their role in fostering women’s political agency within parties. This article addresses this gap by examining women’s organizations across different party families in Italy from 1994 to the present. The Italian case is particularly suitable for this analysis because it allows for the comparison of parties across the ideological spectrum during a phase of party system transformation, as well as across a variety of party organizational arrangements. Moreover, post-1994 political parties inherited a strong tradition of internal women’s groups, which had previously struggled to emerge and to act as agents of party change during the years of second-wave feminist mobilization. The paper pursues two main objectives. First, it proposes a novel conceptulisation of “women’s group agency”, distinguishing between two distinct analytical levels. More specifically, the first level capture women’s internal agency within parties, understood as women’s groups’ capacity to carve out organizational space, gain access to decision-making arenas, and shape internal processes and discourses. At the second level, it examines agenda resonance, defined as the extent to which women’s issues and frames promoted by women’s groups are reflected in parties’ programmatic priorities. Second, empirically, it analyses the origins, evolution, degree of institutionalization, and formal and informal functions of women’s groups within Italian parties. We base our analysis on the triangulation of multiple data sources, including party statutes and internal rules, women’s groups’ documents and activity reports, interviews with women’s group members, and secondary literature. Party parliamentary bills will be used to capture agenda resonance. By offering a comparative framework for the study of women’s groups across party families, this article provides a first systematic contribution to an understudied area of party research. More broadly, it assesses whether – and under what conditions – women’s groups enhance women’s political agency within parties, and whether this internal efficacy translates, fully or partially, into intra-party practices and party agenda commitments on women’s issues.