^aDepartment of Political Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6

Correspondence: Edward A Koning, E-mail: 8eak@queensu.ca

Abstract

When arguing in favour of the descriptive representation of women, advocates usually hypothesize that it has two positive effects. First, some argue that female voters are more likely to feel included in the political system once there are more women in parliament (symbolic effect). Second, it is often said that female MPs are in someway 'better' at representing women than men (substantive effect). This paper investigates whether there is evidence for these two effects in the case of the Netherlands from 1971 to 2006. The results suggest that the symbolic effect is strong for female voters of the Dutch Labour Party, but very weak or non-existent in case of the Christian Democrats and Liberals. In contrast, the substantive effect is only visible for the Christian Democrats and Liberals and absent for the Social Democrats.