Old and new resistances to gendering political representation in parliaments: parliamentary behaviour and feminist institutional response

Gendering political representation faces both old and new resistance. Old resistances include the gendered formal and informal norms that affect the division of tasks in parliamentary work and issue prioritization. While men tend to be overrepresented in leadership positions and assigned to more recognized portfolios, women tend to be underrepresented in leadership positions and participate much less in parliamentary debates concerning economy, security, or foreign affairs. Since the emergence of antigender campaigns and radical right populist parties in Europe in the last decade, gendering political representation faces a new resistance exercised by political forces that actively oppose gender equality by attacking discriminated groups through hate speech, delegitimizing equality in the discourse, and backsliding gender equality policies. This paper explores the relationship between gendered norms and the participation of MPs in thematic debates under the current climate of resistance to gender equality. We ask how increasing opposition to gender equality in and out of the Parliamentary arena affects MPs’ parliamentary behaviors and what institutional response is offered to such opposition. The empirical strategy relies on the quantitative analysis of issue prioritization in parliamentary debates for the last three decades and the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with members of the Parliament of Catalonia.