Representing Women in Parliament

A Comparative Study

Marian Sawer, Manon Tremblay, Linda Trimble

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134162925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first book-length treatment of the political representation of women in countries with parliamentary systems based on the Westminster model.

Written by a major international team of authors, this new study features twelve chapters on both new and established parliaments, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. It tests the latest theories about women's political representation within Westminster style assemblies and is organized into three key sections that:

• 
  
  

• examine the extent to which the descriptive representation of women in the 'old' Westminster parliaments has progressed in recent years, and the factors which have enhanced or impeded development.
• explore the relationship between the numbers of women elected and the substantive representation of women – or the extent that women 'act for' women.
• review the recent experiences of four 'new' Westminster parliaments (Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Nunavut) and evaluate the political opportunities for women provided by the creation of new institutions.

This new comparative study will be of great interest to students and researchers of legislative studies and of gender politics and gender studies.

1 Introduction
Patterns and practice in the parliamentary representation of women

Marian Sawer, Manon Tremblay and Linda Trimble

‘Women in parliament’ became the object of increased international attention in the 1990s. In the United States the entry of an unprecedented number of women into Congress led 1992 to be dubbed the ‘year of the woman’. In New Zealand, one woman Prime Minister replaced another at the end of the decade, leading to the view that ‘women were on top’ in that country. In the United Kingdom, ‘Blair’s Babes’ brought colour to the House of Commons and controversy over what difference they made to politics. Women’s presence in the new Scottish parliament and the Welsh Assembly reached levels previously associated only with the Nordic countries. In Australia, Labor Party quotas continued to increase women’s presence in parliaments around the country. In Canada, progress was stalling, but Canada continued to boast more elected women than its neighbour to the south.

The representation of women was a priority issue for the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action adopted by 189 countries at the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women. It was promoted by a range of multilateral bodies, including the United Nations, the European Union, the Inter-parliamentary Union and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). The underrepresentation of women has become widely associated with problems of ‘democratic deficit’ and donor agencies have focused attention on it as part of strategies to strengthen democratic accountability and good governance. It is also a cause that has been taken up by new and existing non-government organisations, including those operating at regional or international levels.

The increased salience of the issue of women’s parliamentary presence has generated a wealth of research on the factors that facilitate women’s legislative recruitment. It has also stimulated exciting theoretical work on when and why we should expect the presence of women to make a difference to the substance of politics. This book draws on this new scholarship to explore the causes and meaning of women’s increased presence in parliamentary politics in four Westminster regimes – the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It also looks at the opportunities that have been created by the changing architecture of politics, including devolution in the United Kingdom and the creation of Nunavut in Canada. American experience and research is drawn on to provide a complementary non-Westminster perspective.

The United Kingdom left its former colonies, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with a legacy of ‘Westminster’ institutions, providing a family resemblance between our four countries. The variations that have evolved within this Westminster legacy help explain some of the differences in women’s political recruitment. It is the combination of commonalities and variations that makes the comparison so useful – comparing apples and crab-apples, perhaps, rather than apples and pears. To date much analysis of women’s political recruitment and representation has been either of the single-country type or of the global type although regional studies do exist.¹ There have also been a number of studies of the Nordic countries, which share a family resemblance like the Westminster countries.²

Our study similarly focuses on four countries with much in common in terms of political institutions, democratic traditions and level of socioeconomic development. The common features provided by Westminster make it easier to focus on the variations that may explain the differing patterns in the representation of women. The differences in party and electoral systems, the path taken by women’s mobilisations and the political opportunity structure provided by federalism or devolution provide some initial explanatory variables.

The patterns revealed by the four Westminster nations are further explored by means of comparison with the United States in the Introduction and Conclusion. The United States has some of the features of the nations explored in this volume – but it is marked by institutional arrangements that depart from the Westminster model. The separation of powers in the presidential system dilutes authority and renders political parties less cohesive, and the congressional system allows legislators considerable autonomy in their representative roles. The dilution of authority and the relative autonomy of legislators provide greater opportunities for lobbyists than in Westminster-based regimes.³ Of course it is not only feminist advocacy organisations that take advantage of this opportunity structure, but also powerful and well funded pro-life and pro-business organisations.

The Westminster inheritance

Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom have shared the Westminster legacy of representative democracy, responsible parliamentary government and strong party discipline. In the past they also shared the British preference for plurality rule, and the kind of two-party political system and majority governments that flows from this. They are all constitutional monarchies, sharing the same monarch and, in the case of Aus- tralia, Canada and New Zealand, appointing Governors General who represent the monarch and act as head of state. The latter three countries are ‘settler societies’ that have unresolved issues relating to their Indigenous populations; this in turn has influenced both Indigenous and non- Indigenous women’s political activism over time.

While all four countries have drawn on the British experience of responsible government, they have evolved in different ways from the nineteenth century. The two countries with a large land-mass, Australia and Canada, superimposed federal systems on that of responsible government, requiring a written Constitution and judicial interpretations of the division of powers and the constitutionality of legislation. As a result, the concept of parliamentary sovereignty was significantly modified in these two countries. The two small countries retain unitary political systems but in the case of the United Kingdom there are now federalising tendencies caused by its relationship with the European Union in one direction, and by devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the other direction. Again parliamentary sovereignty has been modified by the jurisdiction of, for example, the European Court of Human Rights.

People and place

These four countries vary significantly in population as well as geography. In population the four countries range from the United Kingdom with some 60 million people to New Zealand with around four million. Canada and Australia are in the middle with 31 million and 19 million respectively. The proportion of women in parliament seems to have a negative relationship to population size in our group, with women doing best in the smallest country, New Zealand, and worst in the largest, the United Kingdom.

Australia, Canada and New Zealand share the unresolved conflicts, characteristic of settler societies, over past dispossession and the present status and rights of Indigenous peoples. New Zealand has a large Indigenous population with treaty rights dating from the Waitangi Treaty of 1840 and has official biculturalism based on the Maori/Pakeha (European-derived) populations. Australia and Canada have much smaller Indigenous populations although in both cases there are concentrations in northern territories. The United Kingdom does not have an Indigenous population in the same sense, although it has experienced Celtic minority parties.

Although Maori women obtained political rights in step with Pakeha women in New Zealand, Indigenous women in Australia and Canada had to wait much longer. The existence of Maori seats also facilitated the election of the first Maori women to parliament long before Indigenous women were elected in Canada or Australia. Canada has official bilingualism based on Anglophone and Francophone settler populations, while New Zealand has Maori and English as its official languages. Australia and Canada have multicultural policies covering their diverse immigrant populations. In all four countries women parliamentarians have become more representative of ethnic diversity in recent years, but it has been a slow process.

Pluses and minuses of Westminster for women

As we have seen, the ‘Westminster model’ of representative democracy includes features such as strong political parties and single-member electoral systems that result in majority governments and executive dominance over parliament. This model stands in stark contrast to the American congressional system, which fragments power among the presidency, the Congress and the Senate, including powerful congressional committees, and features less cohesive political parties.

One advantage of the strong party discipline associated with Westminster is that once a party includes women’s rights in its platform parliamentarians are largely bound to uphold them, regardless of personal views. It provides a different context for women’s political representation from that of weak party systems, such as that of the United States, where legislators are not subject to a party whip and are exposed to a great deal of lobbying as to how they will cast their votes. In Westminster party systems, however, traditionally there is a free vote on issues such as abortion, so the same kind of cross-pressures occur on these issues as in candidate-centred systems.

Another advantage of strong party systems is that the cost of campaigning is carried by the party rather than by the candidate and there is not the barrier for women of having to raise large amounts of campaign finance, as in candidate-centred political systems. For instance, in the United States, where state law regulates political parties and electoral systems, rules governing electoral financing constrain the ability of parties to assist candidates financially.⁴ In the United States, and to a lesser extent in Canada, the candidate has borne a large portion of the costs associated with contesting nominations and elections, a financial burden that many female political aspirants have found onerous. In Canada political finance reforms at the national level now cap nomination expenditures and provide assistance with election expenses; the government reimburses 60 per cent of the amount spent by those candidates who win at least 10 per cent of the vote in their constituencies. In Australia there are also public funding regimes at the national level and in the three largest states (and one territory). At the national level public funding is restricted to parties or independents who obtain at least 4 per cent of the vote and in 2005 each vote was worth about A$2.00. In New Zealand and the United Kingdom expenditure is limited both by overall caps and by the restriction of electronic advertising.

One of the disadvantages for women associated with Westminster is the tradition of single-member electorates. It is clear from international evidence that multimember electorates facilitate women’s and minority representation – giving parties an incentive to construct tickets appealing to all sections of the community and satisfying all sections of the party. Another disadvantage for women of systems based on single-member electorates is that they militate against the representation of non-regionally based minority parties. Most notably in Australia and New Zealand, post-materialist minor parties like the Australian Democrats and the Greens have fielded the highest proportion of women candidates and have given significant leadership opportunities to women. In Canada the New Democratic Party (NDP), which has given unrivalled leadership opportunities to women, has also been disadvantaged by the electoral system.

The single-member electorate system is also the cornerstone of what political scientist Arend Lijphart identified as the ‘majoritarian’ model of democracy.⁵ Under this model we get strong Cabinet government and classic Westminster parliaments, with government on one side and the opposition on the other, engaged in ritualised warfare. This model can be contrasted with electoral systems based on proportional representation, such as those in European countries, where parties gain representation in proportion to their support in the community. A multi-party system emerges, and governments are formed through a process of bargaining and coalition-building between parties. Lijphart terms this the ‘consensus’ model of democracy.

The highly confrontational game played out on the floor of the chamber in Westminster parliaments is a game at which few women MPs believe they excel: they are subject to adverse judgements on their femininity (transgressing gender codes) if they adopt the existing rules of engagement and adverse judgements on their effectiveness if they do not. When reinforced by strong party discipline, this confrontational game makes co-operation across the floor on issues of special concern to women very difficult. Committee work, on the other hand, provides some scope for cross-party co-operation.⁶

Sometimes the confrontational game played out in public masks agreement between the major parties on issues of economic ideology. In both New Zealand and the United Kingdom there has been significant discontent with the Westminster model of untrammelled executive power and women have been active in campaigning for more inclusive and consultative political institutions. In the United Kingdom devolution has led to significant gains for women in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland,⁷ while in New Zealand the adoption of MMP, supported by groups such as Women’s E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Patterns and Practice In the Parliamentary Representation of Women
• Part I: The Descriptive Representation of Women
• Part II: The Substantive Representation of Women
• Part III: New Institutions, New Opportunities?
• Bibliography