Title: How and Whom Do Women Represent in Legislatures?
Abstract: The chapter evaluates the relations between substantive, descriptive, and symbolic representation in the Mexican states’ Congresses from 2014 to 2021. Once women gain access to office, political representation aims to ensure that public decisions reflect, to some extent, the interests of the represented group. The research explores what factors allow this representation to be effective. Based on an original database of 46 of 64 subnational legislatures (2 for each of the 23 states) that allowed the registration of 24,397 legislative proposals, it evaluates how many generalist proposals are presented, how many of them can be classified as part of the feminist agenda, which actors present them (men, women, mixed groups) and whether they are approved. The findings show that descriptive representation has a positive, substantive, and statistically significant effect on four of the six operationalizations of substantive representation. The results also reveal that the relation between symbolic and substantive representation is less clear. Only one of the four operationalizations of symbolic representation is statistically significant, and the magnitude of its effect is smaller than that of descriptive representation.
Publication Year: 2022
Publication Date: 2022-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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