| dc.description.abstract | Even though most political scientists writing on gender presence in parliaments tend to focuson either socioeconomic or political factors, my finding is that gender roles is the factor withthe most explanatory power. Those scientists that until now have been writing on cultureoften ignore the construction of gender as more than an effect of broader societal values asreligion or postmaterialism, even though there are some exceptions (as Paxton and Kunovich2003, and Wilcox, Stark and Thomas 2003).My purpose is to identify the causes for the variation of gender presences in 30European parliaments, and while doing so, I add a queer perspective to comparative politics. Ifollow Butler (2004: 1) in treating gender as ”a practice of improvisation within a scene ofconstraint”. The practice can be partly detected through socioeconomic measures, eventhough this is not an easy task on a macro level. The scene of constraint I do identify asrelated to perceptions of gender roles. As such, I treat gender as a purely socially constructedconcept, and I argue that how gender is constructed socially, culturally and politically willhave great impact on the presence of women and men in parliament.The concept of gender has not been challenged in comparative politics, but rathertreated as a prediscursive premise on which politics are constructed. I see gender as a ”doing”rather than ”being”, and therefore as something that is constructed through discourses. I thinkthis perspective brings some new implications both for politics and political science, as bothneed to take into account how gender is constructed, in practice as well as by constraints.I identify three main categories of explanatory (independent) variables in the literatureon gender presence in parliaments, and devote a chapter to each; socioeconomic (on one handpractices as labour market participation and education, and on the other broad societalmeasures on economic development), cultural (values and norms), and political (party systemand electoral arrangements) variables. Through bivariate regression analysis, I identify somevariables with more explanatory power on the dependent variable (presence of women inparliaments) than others, and through a multiple regression analysis, I end up with aninteractional model. The numbers of women and men in parliaments are explained by genderroles modified by the political system, and this model can statistically explain 64,2 percent ofthe variation in gender presence of the various European parliaments, and hence my rewritingof Stein Rokkan’s famous quote1 into ”Politics count, gender roles decide”. | en_US |
