Earning Their Stripes? How Political Experience Shapes Gendered Policy Prioritization

Bibliographic Data

ID6300632
AuthorsLotte Hargrave (0000-0001-5310-5277, University of Manchester, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume49
Issue3
Pages429-454
Publication date2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLegislative Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0362-9805 • E-ISSN: 1939-9162
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/lsq.12444
OpenAlexW4389091254
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited54

How does political experience affect the issues that men and women politicians prioritize? Gender stereotypical expectations dictate that women focus more on traditionally “feminine” policy areas. While past findings broadly support this, they do not examine how policy priorities shift with increased experience. Focusing on the United Kingdom, I argue that gender differences in the extent to which politicians raise issues traditionally associated with women will be most pronounced among junior politicians who lack experience in the eyes of the public and their colleagues, but will decline with increased political experience. To test this, I study parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019 and leverage novel quantitative text approaches to measure politicians' issue priorities. I show that, among junior politicians, women talk significantly more about “feminine” issues, however this gap decreases markedly with increased seniority. These findings have important implications for the representation of women's voices and perspectives within the policymaking process

Affect (linguistics · Economics · Leverage (statistics · Political science · Politics · Prioritization · Public policy · Representation (politics · Seniority · Sociology · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies

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