Does the condition facilitating the legislative representation of women differ between bill initiation and bill adoption? If so, how? This paper explores these questions by comparing the legislative activities of lawmakers concerning “women’s issue” bills, such as those related to women’s safety and rights, reproductive health, motherhood, and gender roles. Specifically, it examines all lower house private member’s bills and related cosponsors in Japan between 1998 and 2024.
Drawing from existing gender politics and legislative studies literature, the paper first examines whether and to what extent legislators’ individual characteristics (elected terms, gender, previous career) and institutional factors (elected tier and party affiliation) facilitate the initiation of women’s issue bills. The findings based on regression analyses of 8000 bill-cosponsor dyads show that newly elected, leftist party-affiliated female legislators from the party tier significantly increase the likelihood of submitting bills promoting women’s issues.
Moving beyond bill initiation, the paper then investigates which factors contribute to bill adoption by analysing the composition of cosponsors for each submitted bill. Surprisingly, all the conditions favourable to women’s issue bill submission were found to be detrimental to the success of a submitted bill. Specifically, the higher the proportion of female, party-tier-elected, newly elected, leftist party-affiliated legislators within a bill's cosponsorship composition, the lower the chance of that bill being adopted. This indicates that in a political environment highly unfriendly to women and dominated by a right-wing party, like Japan, legislative success related to women necessitates cooperation from more established mainstream political actors with experience.
This paper contributes to legislative studies by demonstrating differing conditions for women’s representation depending on legislative stages, thus calling for a more nuanced approach in future research.
