Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-dfsvx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T05:12:55.659Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Effects of Female Leadership on Women's Voice in Political Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2019

Jack Blumenau Open the ORCID record for Jack Blumenau [Opens in a new window]
Jack Blumenau*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University College London
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: j.blumenau@ucl.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Do female leaders amplify the voices of other women in politics? The author addresses this question by examining parliamentary debates in the UK House of Commons. In the context of a difference-in-differences design that exploits over-time variation in the gender of cabinet ministers, the article demonstrates that female ministers substantially increase the participation of other female MPs in relevant debates, compared to when the minister is male. It also uses a measure of debate influence, based on the degree to which words used by one legislator are adopted by other members, to show that female ministers also increase the influence of female backbenchers. To explore the mechanisms behind these results, the author introduces a new metric of ministerial responsiveness and shows that female ministers are significantly more responsive than their male counterparts to the speeches of female backbenchers.

Keywords

legislative politicsgenderwomentext-as-datadebate
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 750 - 771
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahlquist, JS and Levi, M (2011) Leadership: what it means, what it does, and what we want to know about it. Annual Review of Political Science 14, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Angrist, JD and Pischke, J-S (2009) Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asgari, S, Dasgupta, N and Cote, NG (2010) When does contact with successful ingroup members change self-stereotypes? Social Psychology 41(3), 203–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ban, P et al. (2018) A Woman's Voice in the House: Gender Composition and its Consequences in Committee Hearings. Working Paper.Google Scholar
Barnes, TD and O'Brien, DZ (2018) Defending the realm: the appointment of female defense ministers worldwide. American Journal of Political Science 62(2), 355–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaman, L et al. (2009) Powerful women: does exposure reduce bias? Quarterly Journal of Economics 124(4), 1497–1540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaman, L et al. (2012) Female leadership raises aspirations and educational attainment for girls: a policy experiment in India. Science 335(6068), 582–586.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beckwith, K and Cowell-Meyers, K (2007) Sheer numbers: critical representation thresholds and women's political representation. Perspectives on Politics 5(3), 553–565.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benoit, K et al. (2018) Quanteda: an R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data. Journal of Open Source Software 3(30), 774. https://quanteda.ioCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertrand, M et al. (2019) Breaking the glass ceiling? The effect of board quotas on female labor market outcomes in Norway. The Review of Economic Studies 86(1), 191–239.Google Scholar
Bettinger, EP and Long, BT (2005) Do faculty serve as role models? The impact of instructor gender on female students. American Economic Review 95(2), 152–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bird, K (2005) Gendering parliamentary questions. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 7(3), 353–370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumenau, J (2019) Replication Data for: The Effects of Female Leadership on Women’s Voice in Political Debate, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2HXTR8, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:cNk2L7LNGzOsULSrK9+pfg== [fileUNF]Google Scholar
Boothroyd, BB (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6-lfwUeS4.Google Scholar
Brajer, V and Gill, A (2010) Yakity-yak: who talks back? An email experiment. Social Science Quarterly 91(4), 1007–1024.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bullock, JG, Green, DP and Ha, SE (2010) Yes, but what's the mechanism? (don't expect an easy answer). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98(4), 550.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, AC and Miller, DL (2015) A practitioner's guide to cluster-robust inference. Journal of Human Resources 50(2), 317–372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, DE and Wolbrecht, C (2006) See Jane run: women politicians as role models for adolescents. The Journal of Politics 68(2), 233–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Catalano, A (2009) Women acting for women? An analysis of gender and debate participation in the British House of Commons 2005–2007. Politics & Gender 5(01), 45–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chattopadhyay, R and Duflo, E (2004) Women as policy makers: evidence from a randomized policy experiment in India. Econometrica 72(5), 1409–1443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Childs, S (2000) The New Labour women MPs in the 1997 British Parliament: issues of recruitment and representation. Women's History Review 9(1), 55–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Childs, S (2004) A feminised style of politics? Women MPs in the House of Commons. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 6(1), 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Childs, S and Krook, ML (2009) Analysing women's substantive representation: from critical mass to critical actors. Government and Opposition 44(2), 125–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Csardi, G and Nepusz, T (2006) The igraph software package for complex network research. InterJournal, Complex Systems, 1695.Google Scholar
Dasgupta, N and Asgari, S (2004) Seeing is believing: exposure to counterstereotypic women leaders and its effect on the malleability of automatic gender stereotyping. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40(5), 642–658.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dietrich, BJ, Enos, RD and Sen, M (2017) Gender dynamics in elite political contexts: evidence from supreme court oral arguments. Working Paper.Google Scholar
Eagly, AH and Johnson, BT (1990) Gender and leadership style: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 108(2), 233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erkan, G and Radev, DR (2004) Lexrank: graph-based lexical centrality as salience in text summarization. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 22, 457–479.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Escobar-Lemmon, M and Taylor-Robinson, MM (2009) Getting to the top: career paths of women in Latin American cabinets. Political Research Quarterly 62(4), 685–699.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fader, A et al. (2007) Mavenrank: identifying influential members of the US Senate using lexical centrality. In Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL), pp. 658–666.Google Scholar
Gilardi, F (2015) The temporary importance of role models for women's political representation. American Journal of Political Science 59(4), 957–970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimmer, J and Stewart, BM (2013) Text as data: the promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis 21(3), 267–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hannah, A and Murachver, T (1999) Gender and conversational style as predictors of conversational behavior. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18(2), 153–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hannah, A and Murachver, T (2007) Gender preferential responses to speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 26(3), 274–290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkesworth, M (2003) Congressional enactments of race–gender: toward a theory of race–gendered institutions. American Political Science Review 97(04), 529–550.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heath, RM, Schwindt-Bayer, LA and Taylor-Robinson, MM (2005) Women on the sidelines: women's representation on committees in Latin American legislatures. American Journal of Political Science 49(2), 420–436.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humphreys, M, Masters, WA and Sandbu, ME (2006) The role of leaders in democratic deliberations: results from a field experiment in São Tomé and Príncipe. World Politics 58(4), 583–622.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imai, K et al. (2011) Unpacking the black box of causality: learning about causal mechanisms from experimental and observational studies. American Political Science Review 105(4), 765–789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karakowsky, L, McBey, K and Miller, DL (2004) Gender, perceived competence, and power displays examining verbal interruptions in a group context. Small Group Research 35(4), 407–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karpowitz, CF and Mendelberg, T (2014) The Silent Sex. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Karpowitz, CF, Mendelberg, T and Shaker, L (2012) Gender inequality in deliberative participation. American Political Science Review 106(3), 533–547.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kathlene, L (1994) Power and influence in state legislative policymaking: the interaction of gender and position in committee hearing debates. American Political Science Review 88(3), 560–576.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kleinberg, JM (1999) Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. Journal of the ACM (JACM) 46(5), 604–632.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krook, ML and O'Brien, DZ (2012) All the president's men? The appointment of female cabinet ministers worldwide. The Journal of Politics 74(3), 840–855.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovenduski, J (2005) Feminizing Politics. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Mansbridge, J (1999) Should blacks represent blacks and women represent women? A contingent ‘yes’. The Journal of Politics 61(3), 628–657.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelberg, T, Karpowitz, CF and Goedert, N (2014) Does descriptive representation facilitate women's distinctive voice? How gender composition and decision rules affect deliberation. American Journal of Political Science 58(2), 291–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelberg, T, Karpowitz, CF and Oliphant, JB (2014) Gender inequality in deliberation: unpacking the black box of interaction. Perspectives on Politics 12(1), 18–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mihalcea, R (2004) Graph-based ranking algorithms for sentence extraction, applied to text summarization. In Proceedings of the ACL 2004 on Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions. Association for Computational Linguistics. Article No. 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, LA and Robinson, MD (1999) The educational attainment of young women: role model effects of female high school faculty. Demography 36(2), 185–194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Brien, DZ (2015) Rising to the top: gender, political performance, and party leadership in parliamentary democracies. American Journal of Political Science 59(4), 1022–1039.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, L et al. (1999) The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the Web. Technical report Stanford InfoLab.Google Scholar
Pearson, K and Dancey, L (2011) Speaking for the underrepresented in the House of Representatives: voicing women's interests in a partisan era. Politics & Gender 7(04), 493–519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanders, LM (1997) Against deliberation. Political Theory 25(3), 347–376.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sapiro, V (1981) Research frontier essay: when are interests interesting? The problem of political representation of women. American Political Science Review 75(3), 701–716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Studlar, DT and Moncrief, GF (1999) Women's work? The distribution and prestige of portfolios in the Canadian provinces. Governance 12(4), 379–395.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomson, R, Murachver, T and Green, J (2001) Where is the gender in gendered language? Psychological Science 12(2), 171–175.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wang, M and Kelan, E (2013) The gender quota and female leadership: effects of the Norwegian gender quota on board chairs and CEOs. Journal of Business Ethics 117(3), 449–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wängnerud, L (2009) Women in parliaments: descriptive and substantive representation. Annual Review of Political Science 12, 51–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolbrecht, C and Campbell, DE (2007) Leading by example: female members of parliament as political role models. American Journal of Political Science 51(4), 921–939.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Blumenau Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2HXTR8
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Blumenau supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Blumenau supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 704.2 KB