The representation of women in national parliaments is one of the central questions in gender-sensitive political science (see Wängnerud 2009; Paxton/Hughes 2007; Krook/Childs 2010; Freidenvall/Alnevall 2014). In the proposed paper, we apply fuzzy set QCA to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for high and low proportions of women in parliament.
Today, every fifth parliamentary seat worldwide is held by a woman; in Europe it is about every fourth (IPU 2014). However, a closer look at the data reveals that the overall picture is not very informative as the proportion of women in national parliaments varies a lot among the countries. While in Europe especially the Nordic democracies show traditionally high shares with an almost equal distribution of the sexes in their parliaments, other EU-member states, e.g. Ireland, Estonia, Malta and Cyprus, show a proportion of women below 20 percent. In Hungary, not even every tenth mandate is held by a woman (IPU).
These variances do not follow the classical institutional (electoral system, quota), cultural (gender roles, religion) or socio-economic (access to education, participation at the labor market) explanations spawned by literature (for an overview see Welch/Studlar 1990; Matland 1998; Inglehart/Norris 2001; Dahlerup 2006; Celis et al. 2008). Instead, the proposed paper argues that these factors do not affect the proportion of women in parliaments on their own, but in combination with each other. Furthermore, we argue that there are different paths to maintain a high or a low proportion of women in parliament. Thus, we apply fsQCA to identify these different (equifinal) combinations of conditions (conjunctions) for different levels of women’s parliamentary representation.
