Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

One of the most salient political issues today is women’s under-representation in state authority bodies. Many factors varying across the world affect how many women get elected. In this dissertation, I look at women’s legislative representation (WLR) in East-European post-communist and post-Soviet countries, which so far been understudied, from different angles. The radical political and socio-economic changes experienced by post-communist countries make them interesting to analyse. In Chapter 2, I address 2 literature gaps by focusing on how democracy and corruption influence WLR in post-communist countries. On the regional level, I am interested in the effect of the rise of multilevel politics on WLR. Thus, in Chapter 3 we develop an argument that the impact of decentralisation reforms on WLR is dependent on regions’ political power. Finally, to overcome the US-centred bias in the studies of personal characteristics of female and male MPs, Chapter 4 focuses on post-communist political elites. A shared legacy of “state feminism” but different trajectories of countries’ post-communist political development create a perfect laboratory for analysing whether the combination of these factors contribute to the eradication of the differences between female and male MPs or to their consolidation. My dissertation contributes to the literature by closing several gaps in research on WLR. The conducted analyses improve our knowledge of post-communist countries and factors facilitating regional variation in WLR. This thesis tests new theoretical arguments and broadens existing ones. The results challenge some of the previous findings based on the studies of developed countries and show that we cannot generalise them to other world regions. A more practical contribution is the collection of 3 original databases which provides an opportunity for a further research of WLR in the post-communist region. Finally, the findings contribute to the debate on women’s substantive representation.