While the vivid scholarly debate about the effects of female (under-) representation in the political sphere has focused on the impact on decision-making and policy outcomes, little attention has been paid on how it affects political attitudes such as political interest. However, political interest is not only a key variable in explaining gender differences in political impact, knowledge and behaviour, but it is also sensitive to characteristics of the political context. Indeed, deliberations brought forward by the contextual cue theory and recent findings from the US context support the notion that the under-representation of women in the political sphere is central in explaining women’s lower levels of political interest. Yet, empirical evidence to support this idea is rare: cross-national research is still in its infancy and findings from Europe are missing.
This paper addresses this gap by exploring the effect of various aspects of descriptive political representation on women’s political interest for 42 European countries using data of the EVS. The multilevel approach taken allows controlling for common micro-level explanations of political interest, while also accounting for various differences between the countries.
The results show that descriptive representation has indeed an impact on female political interest, although differentiation is needed. For example, neither the existence of parliamentary-level quotas, nor the gender composition of the parliament affects the political interest, whereas the share of female ministers proves to be relevant. Based on these findings, I argue that only the composition of highly visible areas of the political realm has a symbolic effect on women’s perception of politics, which in turn influences their political attitudes. As a consequence, increasing the number of visible politicians is a vital step for closing the still existing gender gap in political interest.
