Title: The influence of female representation on the performance of parliament: Key lessons from Rwanda. Level: Final assignment for Master’s Degree in Business Administration. Authors: Mirembe Joseline & Hujie Njie Supervisor: Dr. Maria Fregidou-Malama Examiner: Dr. Ehsanul Huda Chowdhury Date: 2018–June Aim: The aim of this research is to investigate how the presence of female representation in the parliament influences its performance. The focus is to understand the stereotyping of female in the parliament and how it affects its performance. In this regard, the focus is on the innovation, social diversity and leadership styles of women and their influence on performance. Method: To achieve the aim, qualitative method has been adapted through having 10 interviews with both female and male parliamentarians from Rwandan Parliament, Secondary data extracted from books and articles was also used. In this study to combine different theories to provide external knowledge about the topic. The data obtained from primary and secondary were used to analyze and discuss the findings. Result & Conclusions: This study confirms that female participation in the parliament influences its performance especially in gender policy bills and issues to developing poor people in the society. Given their number, they developed confidence in decision making. Also the study reveals that social diversity, innovation as well as leadership styles of women in the parliament boosted the performance. This later helped in collaborating with other institutions and provided capacity-building activities to the public. However, there is still a gap in childcare agenda and working hours as female members of the parliament work beyond working hours. Contribution: This study contributes to existing literature as it examines the ways gender equality can be used as a tool to increase and stimulate discussions before making important decisions. It also shows how organizations can use gender equality as a strategic advantage. Our work gives other parliaments, organizations and countries an insight on how to improve their performance through gender balancing. This study can be used by organizations to gain insight on the way women in general operate when they are in high positions and how it can be used as an advantage. Suggestions for future research: Further research can be conducted to analyze how women can be motivated to progress their career development. Other researchers could research strategies for female to be appointed in high positions.

Many questions about the relationships between debate, policy, and substantive representation are still unanswered. Two such examples are, the role of gender, but also - how crises affect representation. This study addresses this gap by examining who (related to gender) speaks about sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and in what way, during an especially critical time (the COVID-19 pandemic). Women’s SRH issues have often gone unrecognized during crises because it is not a direct effect of a virus, but an indirect consequence of structural inequalities. It is therefore interesting to analyze men and women MPs’ legislative behavior and policy priorities during COVID-19. For this study, a dataset is created where individual-level MP speech data serve as the indicator for substantive representation. The methodological contribution made in this paper, using a mixed-method approach, highlights some of the problems associated with studying substantive representation using only quantitative methods. While the quantitative content analysis finds support for the fact that women MPs speak more about SRH than men, the frame analysis highlights that mentioning keywords does not necessarily entail substantive representation. Women MPs generelly frame SRH issues as a structural problem of inequality, while male MPs frame it as an urgent problem caused by the pandemic, or in some cases, as not a problem at all. Studying the case of Uganda is especially interesting because it can provide additional knowledge about representation in an African parliament, and in a semi-authoritarian country.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organization that provides the technical support for the Internet. ICANN is a nonprofit organization based in California and is under contract to the United States Department of Commerce. It has come under attack from many sides because it is contracted through the U.S. government and it is a private entity. One of the main components of the controversy surrounding ICANN is whether it can represent a global society as a private entity and whether that private entity can represent Internet users. I focus my study on ICANN's Board of Directors. I evaluated the Board on the dimensions of descriptive, substantive, and formal representation (Pitkin 1967). Evaluation of ICANN's descriptive representation focused on the Board members' sex, educational backgrounds, and nationalities and compared the geographic representation on the Board to the global distribution of Internet users. The assessment of substantive representation looked at the Board members' votes to determine if patterns could be viewed based on members' descriptive characteristics. Finally, the evaluation of ICANN's formal representation examined its Bylaws, its 2006 contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporations Code. The analysis found that the descriptive representativeness was low. The ICANN Board does not mirror Internet users: few women have served on the Board, those with technical educational backgrounds dominated, and the regions were not represented proportionate to their use of the Internet. Analysis of substantive representativeness was inconclusive and further investigation is needed. The formal representation analysis suggests that the ICANN Board has been formally representative. / Master of Arts

This study aims to understand the Kenyan cross-party parliamentary women’s caucus success at representing women substantively despite ethnic division. The Kenyan case highlights a paradox: the cross-party parliamentary women’s caucus is successful in a country where politics is shaped by ethnic division, which contradicts existing theories suggesting that the many layers of identity politics would make it difficult for the members to cooperate on a common women’s agenda. The material was collected during ten weeks in Nairobi through interviews with women MPs within the caucus and through observation of meetings, events, and the daily work of the caucus. The findings suggest that women’s issues are perceived as non-political, and non-controversial, which makes it possible for the members to cooperate on a common women’s agenda. Kenya seems to be in an initial stage of gender mainstreaming where the caucus’s members cooperate on women’s fundamental rights, on which they can all agree. It is reasonable to believe that the political parties will develop ideological differences concerning women’s issues as Kenya achieves a certain level of gender equality. The cross-party parliamentary women’s caucus will, according to the findings, be essential to improve the substantive representation of women in the Parliament.

This study set out to answer how and to what extent the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are addressed in parliamentary debates in the Southern African regional context. As both the proportion of women in parliament and the level of democracy have been established by previous research as important conditions for women to be able to act for women as a group, four countries with varying combinations of these factors are examined. By conducting both a quantitative and a qualitative text analysis on Hansards from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, the study analyses the extent to which the gendered effects of the pandemic are addressed and how they are addressed respectively. The results reveal that a combination of a high proportion of women in parliament and a high degree of democracy is the most favourable condition for enabling the substantive representation of women. A democracy with a low proportion of women in parliament is shown to be more allowing for the substantive representation of women than an electoral autocracy with a high proportion of women in parliament. Moreover, the qualitative frame analysis sheds light on the different issues which are in focus on the framing of the gendered effects of the pandemic in different parliaments depending on their level of democracy. Particularly, the issue of gender-based violence in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic is found to have reached the political agenda in the democratic cases, whereas MPs in the less democratic parliaments are more likely to feminize their cause by focusing more on traditionally feminine policy issues such as the health effects of women within the context of the pandemic.

In 2015 the Polish political environment saw a sudden change with the election of PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość/Law and Justice), a conservative right-wing wing party that became the ruling voice in society. Due to the interconnectedness of politics and religion, the role of the Catholic church gained prevalence leading to a shift in the preferred discursive practices. This paper shall primarily focus on the gender perspective, specifically the envisioned role enforced on Polish women by PiS given the shift from liberalism towards conservatism. Substantive representation linked to descriptive representation shall allow to researching policies that concern the needs of women.  As an objective, the study aims to explore gender roles and womanhood through social discourse as well as political actions. The study contributes to the identified research gap between social conservatism and the substantive representation of women in Central and Eastern Europe. Three theories are employed (the Queer theory, the Performativity theory and the Dramaturgical model) that complement each other with the purpose of creating a multi-layered analysis.  In terms of methodology, qualitative research is conducted that includes a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in relation to online data, drawing on principles from nethnography and feminist ethnography. Moreover, in order to grasp the lived experience, a small number of interviews have been conducted. Results have shown the challenging social positioning of women after the implementation of policies concerning women’s rights, such as reproductive rights. This created national debates as to what it means to provide women with a ‘voice’ and how this might threaten the freedom of expression and consequently human rights. Counter-narratives show the resistance to the conditioning of behavioural expectations.

This study investigates resistance against female local government politicians in Sri Lanka during their first year and a half as members of local government councils, as a result of the 25 % gender quota introduced in 2018. Further, the study investigates these newly elected female politicians’ perceived ability to influence local government politics; experienced substantive representation. Through a minor field study, in-depth interviews were conducted to examine forms of resistance and perceived political influence of these newly appointed women. Several types of resistance were found and divided into three categories; Patronizing Behavior from Male Politicians; the Dispute Between Elected and Appointed Women; Public Distrust. Some evidence of the mandate effect and the label effect were detected, further hampering substantive representation. The study concludes that despite a significant increase in descriptive representation, substantive representation was not necessarily experienced by the interview subjects. Further studies are encouraged to deepen the understanding of the resistance towards appointed female politicians in Sri Lanka, and moreover the problematic effects of the implementation of gender quotas in highly unequal states.

What explains the inconsistency of female empowerment in South America, despite high levels of institutional inclusion? Generally, the social sciences tend to lean on the tenets of liberal feminism in order to measure the development of gender-inclusive policy changes; however, their findings indicate that higher levels of institutional inclusion does not necessarily translate into the empowerment of women as a group. Further, within political science, there is little research addressing the relationship between feminist movements and the feminist opinion of individuals within a state. I argue that strong feminist social movements provide a context in which feminist opinion is magnified, and where individuals will be more likely to support progressive policy changes. Using questions from the World Values Survey, I operationalize progressive policies as the Justifiability of Abortion. My primary independent variables are the presence feminist movements and the presence of feminist opinion, which is measured by support for female sexual freedom. After using a multilevel mixed-effects linear regression, I find support for my hypotheses, indicating that feminist opinion is magnified by the presence of feminist movements.

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In this dissertation I systematically examine African-American and Latino legislator behavior in a legislative setting. The project specifically examines whether and how minority legislators represent and influence African American and Latino policy interests during the legislative process. I perform an analysis of minority legislator participation rates on bills and develop an original measure of substantive representation using patterns in legislative speech of state representatives’ language during committee hearings. I build on existing theory in the representation literature and offer new hypotheses for expanding the scope of how substantive representation is defined and investigated, namely through an empirical investigation of the link between deliberation and descriptive representation. Second, I collect an original data set and develop an original measure of substantive representation to test these hypotheses with participation rates and a linguistic frame based content analysis approach of minority and non-minority representatives’ language on bills for racial perspectives during state legislative committee hearings on several policy issue areas including, but not limited to education, healthcare, and immigration. Third, I offer a critical test of hypotheses to test whether African American and Latino representatives’ (1) participate more when the legislation is deemed minority interest in comparison to their non-minority counterparts? (2) their behavior (or deliberation style) is different from non-minority legislators? (3) impact the deliberation style of non-minority legislators? The analysis draws on original data collected through committee hearing tapes and online video archives of Texas committee hearings in multiple policy areas, and the findings indicate that minority legislators do indeed provide a voice for minority constituents, providing more minority interest language on minority interest bills in comparison to their non-minority colleagues, especially when the legislation is threatening to minority populations. These results support the argument that minority legislators do indeed substantively represent minority constituents at levels greater than non-minority representatives during the legislative process.