This study aims to advance our understanding of why women are
underrepresented in legislatures around the world, and what accounts for
the wide variation over time and across countries. Scholars generally
agree on many of the favorable conditions for women to enter parliament,
including, inter alia, proportional representation, leftism in government,
and female employment. However, the mechanisms that link women's seat
shares to the supposed explanatory factors are still poorly understood. In
this study, we argue that the key link resides in welfare state policies
that 1) free women to enter the paid workforce, 2) provide public
sector jobs that disproportionately employ women, and 3) change the
political interests of working women enough to create an ideological
gender gap. The emergence of this gender gap, in turn, creates incentives
for parties to compete for the female vote, and one way that they do so is
to include more and more women in their parliamentary delegations.We are grateful to Natsu Matsuda for capable
research assistance, to Torben Iversen for sharing data, and to Ethan
Scheiner and Bing Powell for helpful comments as discussant for this paper
at a panel at the 2004 American Political Science Association meetings in
Chicago. Thies also acknowledges the support of a grant from the UCLA
Academic Senate's Committee on Research.