Misrepresented or Miss Represented? Examining Gendered Priority Responsiveness in the Norwegian Parliament

Equal responsiveness is a key principle of democracy, yet measuring it empirically remains challenging. While research on gender biases in political responsiveness has focused on whether citizens' directional preferences are reflected at the elite level, less attention has been given to disparities in how men’s and women’s issue priorities are incorporated into policymaking. This leaves two critical blind spots: it overlooks the varying importance citizens assign to issues and whether the issues prioritized by specific groups are included in the policy agenda in the first place. This article introduces the concept of gendered priority responsiveness, which assesses the extent to which representatives’ issue priorities during parliamentary debates reflect the issue priorities of male and female citizens equally well. Using 131,601 open-ended survey responses from Norwegian citizens on the most important political issues and an original dataset of 127,830 parliamentary speeches from the Norwegian parliament over a decade, this study identifies significant gender gaps in priority responsiveness, even in Norway’s comparatively gender-egalitarian context. Male and female citizens differ significantly in their issue priorities, and representatives allocate more attention to issues prioritized by male citizens. This disparity appears to be driven by representatives’ tendencies to focus on issues emphasized by citizens of their own gender. Since women are in the minority and deliver fewer speeches than their male counterparts, their stronger focus on issues prioritized by women does not meaningfully affect overall patterns of priority responsiveness. By contrast, male representatives’ tendency to prioritize issues important to men appears to drive the observed bias. Importantly, neither party affiliation nor government ideology significantly mitigates or exacerbates this inequality. These findings reveal a systematic bias in how representatives address citizens’ policy priorities, suggesting that the democratic ideal of equal responsiveness remains unfulfilled, even in contexts with high levels of gender equality.