Suchergebnisse

While analysis of the relationship between the descriptive and substantive representation of women has mainly focused on women politicians as critical actors in many contexts political parties provide the linkage between voters' preferences and policy programmes. The manner in which political parties respond to women voters is shaped by both the information they receive about women voters' preferences, from the news media, pollsters and other sources, and by gendered party type. Analysis of parties' attempts to target women voters can help us understand whether parties perceive women as typical or average voters. I conduct two case studies on the influence of gendered newsframes on party policy and inter-party competition in the United States and Great Britain to formulate a preliminary analytic framework designed to facilitate research to assess how parties' responses to portrayals of women voters vary according to institutional and contextual factors across time and space.

Feminist political scientists have had a two-track response to Robert Putnam's work on social capital. They have critiqued his original approach for failing to take gender into account, but they have also highlighted the potential of the concept for illuminating mechanisms that reproduce unequal gender relations. In the British case, Peter Hall and Vivien Lowndes have shown how key elements of Putnam's measures are highly gendered. Vivien Lowndes set out a research agenda for assessing the impact of men and women's group memberships upon political participation. This article tests Lowndes' research questions using British data from the Citizenship Survey 2007. Men and women in Britain do belong to different formal associational networks but these differences do not appear to have a strong impact upon whether they participate in politics. Lowndes' critique of the social capital literature's failure to incorporate women's informal child-care networks is supported; involvement in child-care networks is positively related to political participation in the form of signing petitions and negatively related to contacting Members of Parliament. Crucially, there are small but statistically significant divergences in the types of activities men and women undertake for organised groups and these roles are associated with variations in political participation. Adapted from the source document.