Bringing Diversity to Parliament? How Gender and Candidate Quotas impact the Content of Parliamentary Speech

Speakers from diverse backgrounds increase the breadth of topics and positions debated in parties and parliaments. Yet, institutionalist perspectives contend that institutional rules allow party leaders to reign in diverging MPs. For example, candidate selection procedures that favor specific background criteria, likely increase the party selectors' ability to choose from among a narrower pool of candidates whose views more closely align with their own. Quotas - as a measure potentially increasing party leadership’s influence on candidate selection - moderate the distinctiveness of MPs’ issue priorities and their issue-positions. Consequently, we argue that candidate quotas for historically under-represented groups, such as women, lead to MPs -- both men and women -- that express fewer distinctive priorities in parliament. We evaluate support for this expectation using the ParlEE dataset including MP-level data on the content of their parliamentary speeches from 27 European national legislatures. We expect women to speak more substantially -- and more distinctively -- about issues such as health care, human rights and social welfare, and men to speak more -- and more distinctively -- on issues such as the economy, defence and international affairs. Yet, as a potentially centralising measure, we expect quotas to reduce these differences. Our findings provide the most comprehensive evidence to date of the substantive difference women have brought to parliamentary politics. Our results also provide compelling evidence for the impact of candidate selection rules on party leaders’ influence and contribute more broadly to understanding the link between individuals’ backgrounds, institutional constraints and the representation process. 

Zachary Greene, Maarja Luhiste and Christine Sylvester