This paper focuses on the link between women’s civic engagement and elected political participation. The first part presents the theoretical aspects of both concepts – i.e. civic engagement and political involvement – and combines them with another category, namely the descriptive representation of women. The second part of the paper is devoted to the methodology of the present research, which consists of both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative research examines the composition of six city councils in Poland (Wrocław, Kraków, Gdańsk, Łódź, Lublin, and Poznań) as well as city mayorships after the last elections (2018). The results confirm a positive correlation between women’s elected political participation and women’s civic engagement. The qualitative research, based on 11 semi-structured interviews, aims at explaining why the civic sector is dominated by women, even though politics still remains men’s domain. Another objective is to identify particular obstacles that prevent female civic activists from further engagement in politics. Specific recommendations for mitigating the identified obstacles and increasing the number of women in politics are provided.
The political transformations of late 1980s and early 1990s marked a ‘new political opening’ for Central and Eastern Europe. In each country of the region, a new institutional order was built in its specific historical and cultural context. However, all countries disregarded the problem of gender balance in bodies of power. As a result, the share of women in descriptive representation shrunk considerably throughout the region. Initially, all countries had a low percentage of women at power but the situation began to diverge over time. This paper presents research findings from a study of women and men parliamentarians in Poland, Latvia and Macedonia, focussing on political representation and, in particular, on barriers which obstruct women’s more active involvement in the public sphere as well as actions, such as quotas, aimed to mainstream gender equality into politics. The problem of women’s participation in the legislature as well as barriers to women’s involvement turned out to bring in an interesting differentiation into gender equality discourses in the three countries under study.
The purpose of this study is to test the determinants of women’s descriptive representation at local level in Slovakia after last local elections in 2018. We focus on the determinants of women’s descriptive representation in Slovak district cities local councils and how various factors (socioeconomic, cultural, or political) affect women’s political representation at this level. Using multiple linear regression and local elections own dataset , we found that most important factor regarding women’s representation is the share of women in a previous electoral term in a given district city, together with other factors indicating the openness of local political culture to female representation, namely the presence of a female mayor in the previous term and the political representation of women in regional councils. On the contrary, the remaining factors had a much less impact of female representation often with an opposite effect to one expected. The results of our study thus show that, together with above mentioned factors, women are less favoured in larger cities, with a more educated population or stronger presence of independent councillors. So, we hypothesize about validity of desirability hypothesis, which stated that women would be much less represented in councils, where politicians have more resources, i.e. specifically in largest cities.
Although political equality is guaranteed in the Constitutions of modern democracies, few members of disadvantaged groups are parliamentarians. Political theorists, free to imagine varieties of democratic processes, increasingly pay critical attention to this problem and to the idea of representation of social groups by members of these groups, i.e. descriptive representation (DR). Yet, surprisingly few political theorists have asked the parliamentarians themselves how they conceptualize and debate the merits of DR. We use the constructivist approach to explore the meaning of unequal representation by comparing the claims of political theorists to data from a recent survey of Polish parliamentarians.We find that parliamentarians and theorists overlap in many of the basic arguments for and against descriptive representation, but with two major differences. First, parliamentarians embed their arguments in the practicalities of their job to such an extent that it is impossible to meaningfully separate theoretical ideas from their relentlessly practical approach. Second, many parliamentarians have an unyielding faith in existing democratic processes, and believe that the democratic system will, eventually, lead to equal representation. That theorists and parliamentarians inhabit different social worlds is one of the main reasons why so many theoretical ideas on how to improve contemporary democracy are rarely implemented: many of them are simply at odds with the people who are supposed to do it.
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