The Quality Of Women's Political Representation

Achieving women’s equal political participation and representation is recognised as a priority by the international community, yet there is increasing recognition that representative democracy has failed to deliver political equality for all women. Numerically under-represented in the world’s democracies, women, especially minoritised and marginalised women, experience something far short of ‘good’ representation. These are moreover ‘troubled times’: with potentially devastating natural and human-made crises (climate change, global pandemics, and economic inequality). The rise of populism not only contests representative democracy’s ability to respond but frequently deploys anti-feminist claims that threaten women’s rights and undermine gender equality. Evidence showing how and when women in their diversity are well represented is needed to sustain the necessary will on behalf of domestic and global actors to counter anti-democratic and anti-gender equality ideas and practices; to enable political and civil society actors to build genuine relationships between women and democratic politics, whereby women’s political equality is fully realised. QUALREP addresses this need by conducting a theoretically rich, comparative empirical analysis of the quality of women’s representation, attentive to intersectional and ideological diversity and with particular concern for the most marginalised women, across five European nations: Belgium; Poland; Portugal, Sweden, and the UK. It brings together a diverse, sometimes conflictual, theoretical, and empirical research field, where progress has slowed and risks stagnation, into a new conceptual framework and methodology; applicable in the future to global research across diverse democracies with the aim of establishing the features of, and conditions for, high quality women’s political representation, providing an essential evidence base for advocacy and policy making that advances gender equality in politics and beyond.