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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.

International audience ; Simply counting the numbers of women present in politics is an inadequate basis for theorizing the difference they might make. Drawing on research on British MPs (interviews with Labour women MPs first elected in 1997, analysis of Labour MPs' voting behaviour and signing of early day motions in the 1997 parliament, and MPs' participation in parliamentary debates accompanying the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act), this article shows how insights gained from empirical research can inform and improve our theorizing. It suggests that the relationship between women's descriptive and substantive representation is better conceived as complicated rather than straightforward.

This article addresses a foundational question of political representation: how do representatives act for those they represent? In a shift away from analyses of individual representatives' attitudes and behaviour, we identify Women's Parliamentary Organizations as potential critical sites and critical actors for women's substantive representation. Offering one of the most in-depth studies to date, our illustrative case is the long-standing UK Parliamentary Labour Party's Women's Committee. With a unique data set, and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we systematically examine the Parliamentary Labour Party's Women's Committee efforts to substantively represent women over more than a decade. We find that the Committee sustains its focus on a small number of women's issues and interacts with party leadership to advance women's interests in a feminist direction. Our findings capture processes of political change, a frequently under-explored stage in studies of substantive representation. We close by identifying the potential for comparative research in this area.

Party member women's organizations were early features of party development. While some contemporary studies maintain these are important sites for the substantive representation of women, there is also a claim that they are in decline. Our primary purpose here is to establish the existence of party member women's organizations – as one test of the first dimension of party feminization: the inclusion of women. We draw on new survey data of 17 European countries provided by Scarrow, Poguntke and Webb. We establish that almost half have a party member women's organization. The new data also permits analysis of relationships between party member women's organization and gender quotas for the top party leadership body (National Executive Committee (NEC)), women's presence among the party leadership and candidate quota rules. Together we see these (i) as a means to establish whether women are marginalized within the party, thereby limiting descriptive representation and (ii) as surrogate measures for women's substantive representation. We importantly find that the presence of a party member women's organization does not come at the cost of women's presence on the NEC. In the final section, we turn our attention to building a new comparative research agenda that more fully addresses substantive representation.

This comparative analysis investigates formal parliamentary bodies 'for women' and informal networks and parliamentary groups ('gender equality bodies'). These are evaluated to determine the extent to which they contribute to a 'good' collective process of women's substantive representation. Focusing on three countries, Belgium, the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand (NZ), we explore which venues are responsive to women and which are inclusive of a wide variety of claims. The UK and NZ cases score better than Belgium on the responsiveness criterion given that linkage with the women's movement is more or less guaranteed while Belgium and the UK appear more promising on inclusiveness, predominantly because of their rules concerning the composition of the gender equality bodies. However, in none do the various bodies constitute a strong site for quality substantive representation of women (SRW). Rather, it appears SRW remains dependent on the role of critical actors.