Representing Women?: Female Legislators in West European Parliaments

This work discusses questions on political participation, representation and legitimacy in the European Union national parliaments. Three major empirical questions structure the book: What affects women's presence in parliaments?, Does the number of women in parliament have an effect? And are women in parliament representing women? Empirical evidences show that institutional reforms need a 'minimal environment' in terms of socio-economic development so as to prove effective. As opposed to the critical mass theory, claiming that a few representatives cannot have an impact on the political outcomes, here the empirical evidences suggest that smaller groups can also influence the different components of the legislative process. The last part turns to the fundamental question of whether a parliament that is descriptively representative, i.e. in which the parliamentarians share certain characteristics with the voters, also is a substantively descriptive parliament, i.e. in which the parliamentarians mirror the voters' opinions.

Mercedes Mateo Diaz is FNRS postdoctoral fellow at the University of Louvain (UCL-Belgium). She has been a postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow at the Robert Schumann Center (European University Institute), where she previously held a Jean Monnet Fellowship. She was research fellow at the Inter-University Centre for Electoral and for Political Opinion Research (Belgium), and visiting researcher at the University of Göteborg granted by the TMR network Representation in Europe. She has made a number of significant contributions to edited works and to peer-reviewed journals such as Verfassungsexperiment - Europa auf dem Weg zu einer postnationalen Demokratie, edited by Liebert, U et al, LIT-Verlag; Le parachutage politique, edited by Dolez, B & Hastings, M, L’Harmattan; Revue Française de Science Politique, South European Society and Politics, Res Publica, Feminist Legal Studies, Opinião Pública, and Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée. She has also co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Future of Gender Equality in the European Union (with Susan Millns, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).