Despite the rapid diffusion of gender quotas , politics continues to be overwhelmingly male dominated. In 1997, the first year for which the Inter-Parliamentary Unionâs database on Women in Parliaments reports a world average, men represented 88.3 per cent of the number of Member of Parliament (MPs) elected to national legislatures; by the end of 2016, the share of men among the worldâs MPs had decreased to âonlyâ 77 per cent. On average, then, the monopoly of men over political power has decreased at a rate of approximately 0.6 per cent per year over the past two decades, indicating that, while there has certainly been an erosion of male privilege, progress has been very slow. Furthermore, the pace of change has not been the same everywhere. For instance, there is considerable variation among the countries that are routinely characterised as democracies: on the one hand, women have recently made significant gains in descriptive representation in both new democracies and established democracies, such as in South Africa, Spain and Belgium; on the other hand, some democracies (whether new, such as Hungary , or established, such as Japan) have yet to shed male monopolies on political representation.
Why are some democracies locked into seemingly immutable cycles of male dominance , while others succeed in âbreakingâ long-established patterns of male privilege? The influential findings of the recent literature on gender quotas notwithstanding, we have very few systematic answers to these questions, for two main reasons. First, the primary focus of feminist scholarship has been on explaining the causes and consequences of womenâs under-representation in politics. Yet, as recent work by BjarnegĂ„rd (2013) and Dahlerup and Leyenaar (2013a) has shown, it is equally important to understand the mechanisms that sustain male over-representation in politics: at the very least, they note, âany explanation of gender gaps in representation is incomplete without considering how male elites reproduce, maintain power and exclude other groups from acceding to powerâ (BjarnegĂ„rd and Murray 2015, 1). A second reason why the reproduction of male privilege has seldom formed the subject of scholarly scrutiny is that the overwhelming majority of studies of gender and political representation have tended to concentrate either on explaining the outcomes of a particular election in a single country case study or, alternatively, on accounting for variation among a specific cluster of case studies at a particular point in time. Yet, as Hughes and Paxton (2008) argue, there is much to be gained from reorienting existing explanations of womenâs political representation towards a longitudinal perspective. Most importantly, the causal mechanisms that sustain male privilege can only be discerned over relatively long periods of time, whether in individual countries or in a cross-regional perspective.
Over the past few decades, male dominance has been a strikingly resilient feature of political representation in one particular group of new democracies: the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. A brief look at the evidence on womenâs representation in politics in the region lends strong support to this characterisation. Womenâs descriptive representation in the national legislatures of most post-communist European countries has increased at a much slower pace than in the established democracies of Western Europe since the collapse of communism. At the very beginning of the transition from communist rule, the proportion of women elected to the six national legislatures examined in this study ranged from 4.5 per cent in Romaniaâs Chamber of Deputies to 13 per cent in the Czech National Council. By the end of 2016, the percentage of women MPs ranged from 9.5 per cent in Hungary to 20 per cent in Bulgaria and 27.2 per cent in Poland . By and large, Europeâs new democracies have also proved impervious to legislated gender quotas , with only 3 of the 11 post-communist member states of the European Union (EU) â Slovenia , Croatia and Poland âhaving implemented mandatory quotas in parliamentary elections. Furthermore, there is widespread consensus among scholars that the opportunities for transformative state feminism have been severely limited by a region-specific combination of weak civil societies, on the one hand, and ineffective womenâs policy agencies, on the other hand. On the whole, then, feminist scholars working on Central and Eastern Europe have had good reason to be critical of the multiple points of resistance to gender equality in the region during the years that have passed since the collapse of communism.
Why has male dominance been such a deeply entrenched feature of post-communist politics? This study seeks to answer this question by uncovering the causal mechanisms that have sustained or, alternatively, challenged male privilege in Europeâs new democracies by focusing on descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation . To date, there are two major findings in this area. Dahlerup and Leyenaar (2013c) focus primarily on the process of breaking male over-representation in politics in established democracies. They argue that this process has occurred in several stages, with initial âmale monopoliesâ on political power being gradually displaced by the entry of increasing numbers of women into politics, to the extent that, in countries such as Sweden or Finland , women represent over 40 per cent of elected representatives (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013c, 296â299). However, the next and final stageâgender balanceâcontinues to prove elusive for men and women in the overwhelming majority of the worldâs âold democraciesâ (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013c, 296â299). BjarnegĂ„rd (2013) analyses the informal mechanisms that maintain male over-representation in politics, arguing that homosocial capital enables male insiders to work together to preserve their privileged status in politics. Overall, renewed scholarly interest in the concept of male dominance has been immensely rewarding for our understanding of how gendered power relations are embedded within the institutions of political representation. Nevertheless, work on conceptualising and analysing male dominance has only just begun.
This study analyses the puzzles of male dominance in Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on three processes occurring in a distinct temporal sequence: first, the process whereby political actors first established the institutions of male dominance in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of state socialism; second, the processes whereby, once created, these institutions were subsequently reproduced within the post-communist political order; and finally, the processes of change that have begun to undermine male dominance in Europeâs new democracies. In doing so, I draw on historical institutionalismâs insight that institutions are best seen as âenduring legacies of political strugglesâ (Thelen 1999, 388) between different groups of actors, such as political parties , womenâs advocates inside and outside the state and international organisations. Within this context, âinstitutionsâ are broadly conceptualised as âthe rules of the game in a society or, more formally, (âŠ) the humanly devised constraints that shape human interactionâ (North 1990, 3). From the perspective of this study, the institutions of male dominance are best described as âthe outcome (conscious or unintended) of deliberate political strategies, of political conflict, and of choiceâ (Thelen and Steinmo 1992, 10). Within the context of Central and Eastern Europe, these strategies, conflicts and choices were nested within the historical processes of transition and democratic consolidation over the period that has elapsed since the collapse of communism.
This study therefore begins by outlining the puzzles of male dominance in Europeâs new democracies: on the one hand, the fact that, almost three decades after the fall of state socialism, male over-representation in politics continues to be such a deeply entrenched feature of politics in the region; on the other hand, the fact that actors seeking to âact forâ women have found it considerably more difficult to achieve positive gender outcomes than their counterparts in Europeâs established democracies. Within this context, I conceptualise male dominance in relation to two strands of scholarship on gender and politics: feminist institutionalist approaches (Waylen 2007; Mackay et al. 2010; Krook and Mackay 2011; Chappell and Waylen 2013; BjarnegĂ„rd 2013; Kenny 2013) and the scholarship on womenâs descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation (Celis et al. 2008; Celis 2009; Celis and Childs 2012; Celis et al. 2014; Lombardo and Meier 2014). I bring these perspectives together into a two-dimensional model for analysing male dominance : on one dimension, the origins, reproduction and change of the institutions of m...