Were women MPs more responsive to women’s priorities during the pandemic?
The list of benefits from having more women in parliament is long and well-documented. Whether it’s increasing political engagement with the female electorate or negotiating more equitable trade policies, the health and legitimacy of democracy stands to gain from having more women in positions of power. Earlier studies of the effects of having more women in parliament — women’s descriptive representation — posits that simply increasing the presence or the number of women in parliament can have a positive impact on women’s representation. Such findings are rooted in the idea that democratic legitimacy requires representation by members who share a common background with the diverse populations they represent. Descriptive representation can be especially important in situations of past discrimination or historic mistrust between groups in society and governments. It enhances communication between such groups and many studies find that voters feel better represented when a common background is shared. Yet, the idea that increased descriptive representation provides tangible benefits for women is not without criticism. A chief complaint is that descriptive representation does not necessarily lead to greater substantive representation. Substantive representation occurs when representatives act in the best interests of the represented, regardless of identity, in a responsive manner. Substantive representation is widely considered the gold standard of democratic representation because it constitutes a dynamic, two-way process in which representatives listen to the preferences of the electorate and respond according to their needs. In this article I examine the most important element of substantive representation: legislative responsiveness. Specifically, I answer whether women’s descriptive representation enhanced legislative responsiveness to women’s issue priorities during the pandemic.
Women’s substantive representation becomes especially important when considering the context of the global pandemic. Both historically and in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, women are more affected than men by the social and economic ramifications of health crises. Consequently, women’s issue priorities differed from their male counterparts during the pandemic. In Australia, the UK, the US and Canada at least, women constituents consistently prioritised health over male constituents, while men consistently placed a higher priority on the economy. Similarly, women constituents placed a greater premium on education and the environment, while men tended to place a greater premium on immigration and crime. These disparities in issue priorities between the male and female electorate allow us to measure the extent to which descriptive representation amounted to greater substantive representation. Specifically, were women MPs more responsive to the priorities of women constituents during the pandemic, or are male MPs just as responsive to the same issues?
For evidence of legislative responsiveness, I wanted to observe MPs’ behaviour in an environment where they are free of institutional constraints and the party agenda. Past findings have shown that representatives are constrained by institutional forces which limit the potential positive outcomes of descriptive representation. Therefore, I turned to a source where MPs have autonomy and are free to express themselves as they please — Twitter. Twitter presents an ideal medium for analysing legislative behaviour because tweets represent unambiguous statements of interests and attention. Additionally, nearly all MPs use Twitter regularly and most send thousands of tweets. When combined, MPs’ tweets allow for a dynamic and nuanced account of legislative attention.
MPs on Twitter
Before providing the data and results, I want to briefly consider how women MPs responded to women’s priorities qualitatively. The Covid-19 pandemic was a health crisis first and foremost, but second-order effects from the virus and the precautions that were taken to stop the spread of the virus affected all areas of society. One of the biggest issues families faced was organising childcare because schools adopted online learning. This elevated the issue of education in the minds of many parents who had previously relied on their children being away in school while they worked and this burden often fell disproportionately on women. Consequently, the challenge with education policy, whether students would attend in-person classes, and how to access childcare in the situation that parents had to work resonated much more with women MPs. Both from the position of being in a governing party and from the opposition, women MPs fought for greater support for families regarding childcare and education. Below, I provide a few of the tweets captured in the analysis that caught my attention.
In the UK, the governing Conservative Party voted down a bill to extend providing disadvanteged children with £15-a-week food vouchers intended to combat childhood food poverty during the thralls of the pandemic. The bill warranted its own hashtag (#SchoolBreakfastBill) and gained attention from the media and footballer Marcus Rashford who critised the Conservative government on Twitter of ‘turning a blind eye to the needs of our most vulnerable children’. The tweet above is from UK Labour MP Olivia Blake who is siding with Rashford and pushing the government to take additional steps to combat childhood poverty and extend the School Breakfast Bill.
Beyond the issue of education, however, it should come as no surprise that health would be a top priority of both men and women given the pandemic. Yet, that was only the case for women constituents. Like education, women placed a greater priority on health than male constituents, who prioritised the economy. Consequently, representation of women’s number one priority would require either women’s descriptive representation or that male MPs be just as responsive to women’s priorities as they are to men’s (spoiler: they’re not). Throughout the lockdowns, women MPs were vocal advocates of health and improving access to healthcare and medical treatment. In many situations women MPs spoke directly to women regarding health — both in relation to the pandemic specifically and more broadly. Most importantly was the intersectional approach taken by many women MPs in addressing health. Below, Democratic representative Bonnie Watson Coleman highlights the dualling challenges of navigating both class and gender.
The lock-downs and prolonged isolation during the pandemic made mental health a challenge. In a final example, Canadian Green Party MP Elizabeth May highlights the effects of drug addiction on the people of Canada. She reminds her audience that Covid-19 is not the only public health emergency and argues for the decriminalisation of drugs.
These examples show how women MPs responded to women’s issue priorities during the pandemic. Women MPs started new conversations about important issues and brought perspectives that were likely only shared with the female electorate. While the tweets represent a qualitative account of descriptive representation and how it enhanced substantive representation, we can also consider the differences in responsiveness between male and female MPs quantitatively.
Based on over 1.8 million tweets, the figure below shows the difference in how female and male MPs responded to issues that were of greater importance to women constituents. The thick lines represent the average attention by gender of MPs in Australia, Canada, the US and UK. The shaded areas represent the variation across the four countries in attention to each respective issue. Women MPs were more responsive to each of the three issues that were prioritised by women constituents during the pandemic. The greatest difference in levels of responsiveness by gender was on education, where there is significant cross-country variation. For health and the environment, female MPs were more similar to their male counterparts, but still had a greater level of responsiveness to each of the issues when averaged over the year.
The data provided here supports the validity in calls for increasing descriptive representation by showing a higher level of responsiveness from female MPs to women’s issue priorities. In addition to quantifying the extent to which women MPs were more responsive than male MPs, the first three tweets show how women MPs responded qualitatively to constituents throughout the pandemic. Women MPs brought attention to often-overlooked aspects of important issues such as women’s reproductive care, mental health and childhood poverty, all of which display a set of shared interests and intersect with the priorities and challenges faced by women of different backgrounds. The individual tweets in the first three figures were selected subjectively and are far from an exhaustive list. In total for 2020 alone, women MPs in Australia, the US, UK and Canada sent 79,591 tweets about health, 36,742 tweets about the environment and 69,643 about education. The sheer quantity of tweets dedicated to issues prioritised by the female electorate show that women MPs are in fact hearing the voices of the women they represent.
Finally, the findings presented show that how we measure the effects of descriptive representation is crucial. Previous studies that question the merits of descriptive representation have relied on measures obscured by institutional factors such as issue congruence or shifts in party ideology. Measuring descriptive representation in a way that captures legislative behaviour free from institutional constraints is crucial for capturing the true effects of descriptive representation. This was accomplished here by using MPs’ individual communication on Twitter. Future measures of descriptive representation — and representation more broadly — should account for differences between institutionalised legislative behaviour and behaviour that is less constrained and more likely to reflect the true motives and ambitions of individual representatives.
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