Politics on Leave: Parental Leave and Women's Decision to Run for Office

• In Event: Parenthood, Marriage, and Participation

Abstract

Despite constituting more than half of the general population, women remain under-represented in political institutions and leadership positions. This in turn has negative consequences for the substantive representation of women whose interests are more likely to be put on the agenda by female delegates.

Political institutions play a central role in fostering the women’s representation in politics. Gender quotas on the party- and electoral system level can increase women’s prospects of being nominated for political office. These instruments presume that female politicians decide to run for office if they have the same chances of being nominated as men. Recent evidence has however indicated that women’s decision to run hinges on other circumstances as well, such as their role in household (Bernhard 2021). Since voters prefer female candidates who represent traditional household models with children (Teele et al. 2018), female politicians potentially face a double burden as caregivers and politicians. Scholars have long discussed whether motherhood has a negative effect on women’s political ambitions and the decision to follow a political career. In this regard, it appears crucial to better understand how socio-political institutions shape women’s decision to enter politics.

Therefore, this article aims to contribute by examining the impact of parental leave frameworks on women’s decision to run for political office. It contends that the existence of parental leave frameworks increases women’s likelihood of running for office. This effect is assumed to be moderated by candidate’s age. The article’s argument rests on two assumptions. For one, women are encouraged to run for office if they know that their political career does not conflict with potential family planning. For another, the existence of a framework that allows for the temporary replacement of a MP in case of parenthood reduces the chances that women are discriminated in the candidate selection process of their political parties.

In most European countries, it is not possible to take parental leave when executing a political office. This can be explained by legal questions about MPs' employment status and the transferability of mandates. However, in some countries, parental leave frameworks exist at the sub-national level. A suitable case is the United Kingdom where some councillors have recently been granted paid parental leave whereas other councils do not have any policies in place yet.

In the case of the United Kingdom, one can leverage the unequal availability of parental leave frameworks for causal identification in a difference-in-differences design. Consequently, I compare changes in the share of female candidates running for councils in regions with (treated) and without (control) parental leave frameworks for MPs before and after the policy implementation. To further investigate the mechanism of potential effects, the main analyses is complemented with data from the ‘National Census of local authority councillors’ and qualitative evidence from interviews with local councillors.

With this article, I aim to broaden our understanding how a critical aspect of democracies, political representation, depends on the existence and configuration of social policies.


References
Bernhard, Rachel, Shauna Shames, and Dawn Langan Teele. "To emerge? Breadwinning, motherhood, and women’s decisions to run for office." American Political Science Review 115.2 (2021): 379-394.

Teele, Dawn Langan, Joshua Kalla, and Frances Rosenbluth. "The ties that double bind: social roles and women's underrepresentation in politics." American Political Science Review 112.3 (2018): 525-541.

Author

• Mirko Wegemann, European University Institute