Present Yourself: Gender and Representation in Maiden Speeches

• In Event: Women as Politicians

Abstract

Gender quotas serve as a means to increase women's descriptive representation. However, it remains unclear whether they have also led to an increase in attention to women’s interests by quota women, specifically in maiden speeches. Maiden speeches are the first speeches that legislators deliver, presenting their positions and aspirations to parliament for the first time. Studies are conflicted regarding whether the quota mechanism promotes the substantive representation of women. Some scholars argue that quota women feel obligated to act for women, yet others found no difference in the promotion of women's interests between quota and non-quota women.
This paper aims to bridge this gap and examine whether women elected via quotas pay more attention to women’s interests in maiden speeches than women who were not elected via quotas. I test this on maiden speeches delivered in the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia between 2006 and 2020. I focus on all the speeches of elected women during this period. By using topic modeling, this study maps the policies that appear in the speeches and combines these topics into hard-policy and soft-policy issues.
My analysis indicates that quota women significantly pay more attention to soft-policy issues, which are seen as an expansion of women-related issues, than non-quota women. However, this gap was not found in hard-policy issues. These findings indicate that quota women are interested in, or even obliged to pay attention to policies ascribed to women, and that quota women tend to follow the traditional gender roles attributed to women.
This paper contributes to the central argument that women’s participation in politics through quotas improves women’s substantive representation. Specifically, it shows how women's descriptive representation translates into a greater substantive representation of women and demonstrates that the goal of gender quotas does indeed fulfill itself.

Author

• Vered Porzycki, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem