Women MPs in the Lithuanian Seimas 2006: Still Hostages of a Masculine Parliamentary Tradition and Organizational Culture?

• Authors: Matonyte I.
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The broad study of political culture and the organizational tradition prevalent in political institutions may be usefully narrowed down to a neo-institutionalism account, which takes into consideration the 'human factor' and individual numbers operating in the institutions analyzed. Analyzes of the significance of numbers (of individuals/actors) in the social processes need to be expanded with vocabulary dealing with the effects of relative numbers and proportional representation. The Lithuanian political stage provides an appropriate case for such an investigation into the realm of gender representation. Historically, women's share in the parliamentary elite fluctuated and increased from a scanty 3–4% in the interwar period, through a decorative 33% in the Soviet era, dropping to 9% after the restoration of Lithuanian statehood in 1990 and then increasing to a respectable 22% after the parliamentary elections in 2004. In the present paper, the authoress reports firstly on gendered interpretations pertaining to the normative nature of power as they were, have been and are used in political (parliamentary) discourse in Lithuania. A limping continuity of political values, associated with men's domination, is observed to have existed throughout the pre-war, Soviet and post-communist periods, despite their differences in respect to political and civil freedoms, rights and expectations. Secondly, she explores and describes shifts in women's political representation and the place of women representatives' among their peer parliamentarians. The main thesis is that women's parliamentary representation is evolving from a pitiable tokenism towards a more open and gender-inclusive structure of opportunities. This change might be interpreted as an indication that changes in values (discourse tradition) may merely be lagging behind the irreversible structural changes, which favor equal gender opportunities in society at large and in positions of power in particular.

Keywords

EN

WOMEN'S SHARE IN PARLIAMENT (LITHUANIA)

Discipline

• POLITICAL_SCIENCES: POLITICAL SCIENCES

• Publisher: Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences and Collegium Civitas
• Journal: Studia Polityczne (Political Studies)
• Year: 2007
• Issue: 19
• Pages: 25-51
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Matonyte I.

• I. Matonyte, Institute for Social Research, Vilnius, Lithuania

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

07PLAAAA03156513