CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Cardoso Pereira, Giovanna De Mello |
|---|---|
| Title | The Effects of Women's Descriptive Representation in Legislatures: A Comparative Analysis of Brazil and Mexico's Congresses |
| Summary | This study analyzes whether disparities in the descriptive representation of women between Congresses relate to differences in how lawmakers operate in one legislature and the other. Following a review of propositions in the literature, I first hypothesize that the higher the presence of women in the Congress, the higher the insertion of women and other minorities' interests in the Congress’ agenda. Second, I hypothesize that the percentage of women in the Congress does not affect the traditional areas in which lawmakers of both genders work, because of female representatives' "marginalization". Finally, I hypothesize that in Congresses with gender descriptive equality, competition makes the productivity of female and male lawmakers similar, while in descriptive unequal Congresses women feel pressured to perform better. I investigate the cases of Brazil and Mexico, two Latin American countries sharing sociopolitical and economic similarities, which adopted gender quotas as early as the 90s’ (Piatti-Crocker, 2019). However, the outcomes in terms of descriptive representation were sharply contrasting. Brazil’s Congress barely changed its gender ratio and only achieved a record of 15% of female representatives in its 2018's elections. Meanwhile Mexico, which started from a similar level as Brazil, conquered technical gender parity in Congress by 2018 (IPU , 2019). Therefore, a comparison of the two countries approximates a “most similar systems” test of whether the higher presence of female deputies in Mexico is related to a higher introduction of women and other minorities’ interests in the political agenda and a higher “democratization” of gender roles in the Congress, in comparison to Brazil. Hence my study relates the topics of gender quotas, women's descriptive and substantive representation, gendered political activity, and democratization. It consists of a comparative case study and is mostly quantitative. |
| Supervisor | Gábor Tóka |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/cardoso_giovanna.pdf |
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