So, my wonderful friend Claire Bloquet and I have come up with an awesome panel idea and we're hoping to submit it to the conference of the ECPR's Standing Groups on Parliaments. In order to do that, we are looking for three or four papers to form the panel. The next SGoP conference will be in Leiden, between June 27-29, 2019.
The title of the panel is Investigating the dynamics of gender and gendered representation in parliamentary settings, so if this sounds like it's just up your ally, come join us! Send me or Claire an email at: larissapeixotogomes[at]gmail[dot]com or claire.bloquet[at]gmail[dot]com
We feel like gender and political institutions has, for far too long, been considered "niche", and while we recognise the importance of our particular spaces in gender conferences, we have a lot to offer to the study of political institutions (and political science in general!). Let's occupy the spaces that belong to us!
See the full call below:
Parliaments worldwide have been, over the past decades, a stage where the growing concern of most countries for gender equality expressed itself in a very visible way. Indeed, a number of Parliaments created a committee, delegation or study group to the representation of women’s interests and minorities : about half of the 178 IPU members declare having at least one. Moreover, policies aiming at equal rights such as marriage equality, parental leave, and electoral gender quotas, have multiplied, and representatives are now expected to take into account gender-related questions.
In light of this, new ways to investigate the link between institutions and gender appeared for scholars who specialised in the legislative studies field. The realization of a global gender-based power imbalance has had an impact on caucuses, committees, and procedures, which may have affected the whole institutional equilibrium, making gender-specific spaces and policies a must-research to understand the process of change of our institutions. Because they serve as legitimate structures of power, political institutions offer an excellent viewpoint on gender relations, as they tend to shape them too. This means that studying gender and institutions may mean studying what one group of representatives (such as women) does, but also could mean analysing the gendered power dynamics within political institutions.
This panel focuses on the link between gender and political institutions of representation, and what both theoretical traditions have to contribute to each other. Does creating specific representational spaces affect an institution’s performance? What are the gendered institutional dynamics and their impact on how representation happens? Can an institutional playbook be altered in order to switch the gendered power dynamics? Is having specific spaces dedicated to gender issues likely to better the substantive representation? This also raises the question of methods: how do we investigate those institutions to answer our questions? How can we grasp the specific effect of gender? What can we learn by quantifying or qualifying their activities? What innovative techniques can we apply that facilitate our perception and analysis of the phenomenon, as well as our explanations of it?
We have chosen to understand gender as all of the issues related not only to women’s rights, but also to every topic affected by a gender-based dynamics (i.e. child care and child custody, sexual misconduct, part-time labor), as well as LGBTQI rights. We encourage the understanding of gender as a power dynamic which benefits heterosexual, cisgender men, while also understanding that it is intersected by other power dynamics. Papers on men & masculinities, race and ethnicity in intersection with gender, women’s studies, and LGTBQI studies are welcomed.
Within this frame, studies on formal rules, such as committee systems, leadership rules, electoral systems, and general procedure, or tacit or informal rules, such as logics of appropriateness and rituals, or the interaction between these formal and informal aspects are all welcomed in this panel.
This panel will welcome papers featuring case-studies, single-case or comparative, past or present, as well as methodological papers with a strong empirical component. A preference will be given to authors willing to discuss methodological and practical issues as precisely as possible, in order to allow collective debate and critical review of the approaches featured in the presentations. Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods papers are all welcomed.
The abstract should not exceed 500 words, and feature a title. The proposal must also feature the author’s name, title, affiliation, and email address as featured in their MyECPR account. Proposals must be sent before the 28th of December, so that the panel participants can be chosen and notified before the submission deadline.
[For accepted papers, the chair would like to encourage the authors to also provide any supplementary material allowing for a better understanding of the research protocol that they used (especially datasets if relevant), as well as the potential issues they are especially hoping for feedback on.]
Chairs’ biographical notes :
Larissa Gomes is a political science PhD student at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brasil. Her thesis focuses on the substantive representation of women in the lower chambers of Brasil, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. She has several papers published on gender and political institutions and co-organised the event “The consequences of a veiled coup”, in June 2018, about the coup against Dilma Rousseff.
Claire Bloquet is a political science PhD student and assistant lecturer at the University of Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne. Her dissertation aims at understanding the institutionalization process of the Women Rights and Equal Opportunities Delegations in the French National Assembly and Senate, and its consequences on the parliamentary process. She co-organized the “Questioning parliaments” conference, which will took place in Paris in November 2018.