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.
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Notes
The largest number of seats taken by female MPs was 60, that is, 40 per cent of the 150 seats in the Dutch Lower House. See also Figure 1.
‘Half of parliament and half of government will consist of women’. The party manifesto can be found at www.rug.nl/dnpp. This and all other translations from Dutch are mine.
Descriptive representation refers to ‘the compositional similarity between representatives and represented’ (Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler, 2005, p. 407). In other words, if 50 per cent of the electorate is female, it would be descriptively representative if 50 per cent of all parliamentarians are female as well.
A rather extreme example from the Netherlands is the plea in 1917 of De Savornin Lohman, the leader of the CHU (a Christian Democratic party). He reasoned that women should not be admitted to parliament because they would distract men with their charms. More modern arguments to advise against the descriptive representation of women are discussed (but not shared) by Boddendijk et al (1980, pp. 15–42) and Mansbridge (1999, pp. 629–641).
Alas, this argument has been subject to little systematic empirical scrutiny, besides analyses of self-reported differences between male and female MPs (see, for instance, Leijenaar, 1989, pp. 156–168). At any rate, the examples of Margaret Thatcher and Rita Verdonk suggest that not all female politicians have a consensual style of practising politics (see Stokes, 2005, pp. 32–33).
This is not to suggest that increasing the number of women in parliament is the only conceivable symbolic statement a political system can make that it cares about women. This paper, however, only addresses to what extent there is evidence that descriptive representation indeed has this symbolic effect.
This is consistent with the findings of Tremblay and Pelletier (2001) that men, as long as they are committed to gender equality, can also be good representatives of women.
The percentage of female parliamentarians has increased over the last 40 years in virtually every country of the Western world, but few countries have experienced as fast an increase as the Netherlands (see Kenworthy and Malami, 1999, p. 243; Mateo Diaz, 2005, pp. 40–49).
According to the theory of the critical mass (see Kanter (1977), and Dahlerup (1988) for classic accounts, and Studlar and McAllister (2002), and Grey et al (2006) for recent discussions on its plausibility and usefulness), the relationship between the number of female MPs and policy responsiveness becomes visible only after the number of female parliamentarians reaches a certain threshold. The suggestion is that female MPs can only start making a difference when they account for about 30 per cent of all MPs (a threshold that has also been identified by the United Nations as the minimum for women to exert influence, see UNDP, 1995, p. 41). Moreover, the theory stipulates that, in order to speak of a truly balanced parliament, at least 40 per cent of parliamentarians should be female. In the period under study here, both these thresholds have been reached.
This information is drawn from www.parlement.com.
Questions on external political efficacy are best suited for this research, because they explicitly deal with the extent to which respondents have the feeling that the political system enables them to make a difference (and not, as for what questions on internal political efficacy are concerned, with the extent to which respondents think they can make a difference, thanks to their own virtues). For a classic account, see Rosenberg (1954, pp. 354–361).
Holmberg (1995) is correct to point out that a comparison of mean values is by itself not an exhaustive and ideal method to determine the congruence between two distributions. For that reason, I also compared the shape of the distributions (single-peaked or multi-modal, skewed or unskewed), and looked at the standard deviation of the various distributions. In only very few cases (four out of a total of 80 comparisons), however, this led to a different conclusion. In order to present the results in a concise and orderly manner, I therefore only report the mean comparisons in the Results section. The results of the other comparisons are available upon request.
On all of these questions, respondents were asked to place themselves on a scale. In the few cases that this was not a seven-point scale, I recoded the scores as such.
I also intended to compare scores in the DPS of 1972 with those of the DPES of that year, but these surveys lack the necessary questions to make the comparison.
One could question at this point whether comparing the views of the electorate on the one hand and parliamentarians on the other produces a perfect measure of substantive representation. After all, the crucial question is whether parliamentarians act in the interest of their voters, not whether they think like them. This is a valid point. However, because of the strong party discipline in the Dutch parliament, one is unlikely to find overt differences in parliamentary behaviour between male and female MPs of the same party. Instead, it is more likely that women ‘make a difference’ in more informal ways, for instance by presenting different points of view at party meetings. As it is difficult to find data on these informal ways in which women act differently (a noticeable exception being the signing of early day motions in the British parliament, see Childs and Withey, 2004), comparing policy views seems a legitimate, although imperfect, method to measure substantive representation.
Of course, it would have been interesting to perform analyses for all Dutch parties. However, many of the analyses would be relatively meaningless because of small sample size.
The VVD and CDA also have women's networks, but these have always been smaller and less organized than the networks of the Social Democrats (see Leijenaar, 1989, pp. 99–100; van der Kooij, 1997).
All waves of the DPES included a question that measures the education level of respondents on a 10-point scale (in the few instances that a different scale was used, I recoded the scores as such). Pearson's R of the correlation between interest in politics and education is 0.466 (significance 0.122), while the correlation between interest in politics and the number of female MPs is 0.369 (significance 0.119).
These results are not shown, but can be made available upon request.
On a five-point scale, where 1 represents ‘women are very much discriminated against’ and 5 ‘women are very much privileged’, the mean score of PvdA voting women was 2.57, whereas the mean score of VVD and CDA voting women was 2.74 (difference significant at 0.001 level). This information is drawn from the DPES of 1972.
Of female PvdA voters, 14.3 per cent said they were better represented by female MPs than by male MPs. This figure is only 7.8 per cent for women who voted CDA or VVD. Data are from the DPES of 1986.
These data are not shown, but can be made available upon request.
This is also true when we control for party affiliation. See Appendix and the Conclusion and Discussion section.
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Acknowledgements
Peers and friends have given me many useful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. In particular, I thank Rudy Andeweg and Vincent Post, two anonymous reviewers of Acta Politica, and the participants of the workshop ‘Participation, Representation, and Democratic Legitimacy’ at the seventh Politicologenetmaal, 29–30 May 2008, Berg en Dal, The Netherlands.
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Koning, E. Women for women's sake: Assessing symbolic and substantive effects of descriptive representation in the Netherlands. Acta Polit 44, 171–191 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2008.43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2008.43