Bringing Diversity to Parliament? How gender and party-level quotas impact the content of parliamentary speech

Speakers from diverse backgrounds increase the breadth of topics and positions debated in parties and parliaments. Yet, institutionalist perspectives contend that institutional rules allow party leaders to reign in diverging MPs. For example, candidate selection procedures that favour specific background criteria, likely increase the party leader’s ability to choose from among the narrower pool of candidates whose views more closely align with their own. Consequently, we argue that party-level quotas for historically under-represented groups such as women lead to MPs that express fewer distinctive priorities in parliament. We hypothesize that women are more likely to speak on compassion based issues and hold distinctive positions divergent from the party leader, but that the existence of gender quotas serves as a moderating force. Quotas - as a measure potentially increasing party leadership’s influence on candidate selection - moderate the distinctiveness of MPs’ issue priorities and the issue-positions they take relative to the leader, reducing variation. We evaluate support for this expectation using the ParlEE dataset including MP-level data on the content of their parliamentary speeches from 28 European Parliaments and the European Parliament. We expect women to speak more about issues such as health care, human rights and the environment relative to the party leader, and that women take more distinctive positions, but that the presence of quotas reduces this effect. The theory and evidence provide compelling evidence for the impact of candidate selection rules on party leaders’ influence and contribute more broadly to understanding the link between individuals’ backgrounds, institutional constraints and the representation process.