Suchergebnisse

It is the day after the UK general election in May 2015. No one single party has 'won' outright.1 The alternative governing teams look very different. Labour sees the party leader Ed Miliband sit at the head of a parity cabinet and government. Yvette Cooper and Harriet Harman will be his foremost 'wing women'; at least 40 percent of his backbenchers will likely be female; as will more than two thirds of his newly elected MPs. A Conservative government would, for sure, see Cameron appoint Theresa May, the current Home Secretary, to one of the four big Offices of State – she's too experienced and too much of a leadership challenger otherwise.2 He will also pepper his team with a good few women too, belatedly meeting his 2015 30 percent target. His summer 2014 government reshuffle showed that he could find women to sit in his Cabinet, if only to see off commentariat 'backlash'.3 But when you look beyond the 'doughnut' of women Cameron places on his Frontbench,4 the Conservative backbenches will likely remain women 'lite'. At least the worst case scenario – of fewer Conservative women MPs in the UK Parliament in 2015 - looks, 100 days out from the election, to have been avoided.

AbstractThere has been extensive consideration of women's under‐representation in the UK parliament. Here we are interested not only in the question of sex and political representation, but in parenthood too: in short, whether national politics is closed to women, and possibly men, with young children. We start with a review of the academic literature on legislative recruitment to see what it has to say about mothers—almost nothing has been written about fathers. Based on a 2013 survey of UK MPs—men and women—we then identify key features of parents' presence at Westminster. For the first time, we can be sure that mothers are in fact significantly under‐represented in the House of Commons. We then consider whether arguments made to support the descriptive representation of women have purchase for mothers. Finally we consider how political institutions might be reconfigured not to be merely woman or even mother‐friendly, but to be care‐friendly.

The study of conservative women is expanding to compensate for the historic over-emphasis of gender and politics research on left-wing women. We add to this burgeoning literature and assess the extent to which the modern gender gap in political attitudes – where women have moved to the left of men – is evident among supporters of the British Conservative Party. We find that, like women party members, women Conservative supporters are noticeably to the left of men, but only on economic issues. This sex gap cannot simply be accounted for by women's employment in the public sphere, lesser interest in politics or because they are more morally conservative than male Conservatives. These findings are likely to have serious implications for intra-party discipline, the support for the Conservative Party at the next British general election and, if replicated elsewhere, speak to what it means to 'represent' the interests of right-wing women.

The opposition between Flinders and John is largely a false one, and consequently the argument between them is rather ritualistic. On the major issue – that political science must engage in political and public debate – Flinders and John agree. Whether there was once a golden age of academic engagement or whether we are now at the high point, at one level does not really matter; what matters more is that political scientists should be engaging with, and responsive to, public debate. We set out an 'impact imperative' and its sister, the 'feminist imperative', arguing that feminist scholarship has always sought to engage with the real world of politics. We set out a series of recommendations to institutionalise and normalise impact, engagement and dissemination into work models and working practices, which if well managed should not detract from serious scholarship or require an aggressive campaign strategy for dissemination. Instead our approach is based on cooperation between academics, across disciplinary silos and the methodological divide.