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Research on representation is increasingly concerned with substantive questions, such as how women members of parliament are acting for women in parliament. To understand the substantive impact women have, we need to understand the power structure in parliament and how women members of parliament use collaboration to represent their constituents. Using a data set of cosponsorship data from 14 European parliaments between 1987 and 2021, and taking advantage of the range of electoral systems, quotas and levels of women's representation present in these countries, I find that women are more likely than men to collaborate on bill cosponsorship and cosponsor more bills with other women, especially when there are few women in parliament. An analysis of bills cosponsored by women reveals that women members of parliament use the tool of cosponsorship to substantively represent women.

The descriptive representation of women has increased greatly over the last decades. This thesis argues that political parties face different incentives when choosing to include women. First, internal pressures can lead to the establishment of quota systems that change the way in which a party nominates candidates. Second, the public perception of gender representation in parties influences that decision as well, with many voters strongly disliking all-male parties. Third, women in parliament act very differently from men: They talk about different issues and push policy-making in a different direction. Fourth, women in parliament are forming cosponsorship networks to influence policy and overcome underrepresentation. In the first paper of this cumulative dissertation, I look at the nomination of female candidates in the UK. The UK Labour party introduced All-Women-Shortlists which greatly increased the number of women among their MPs, a strategy that women's interest groups in the party pushed for. Meanwhile, the Conservatives did not achieve a similar effect, even though party leadership has publicly campaigned for more women among their MPs. In the second paper, I use a survey experiment to measure preferences of voters for equal representation among MPs in political parties. The results show that voters strongly dislike gender-unequal parties. While parties can even out the negative perception of male-dominated groups of MPS by having a female leader, these findings give a strong indication that it would be beneficial for parties to have gender-equal groups of MPs. In the third paper, my co-author and I use speech data to see whether women and men speak differently in parliament. We find that not only can machine learning algorithms distinguish men and women speaking, the words that distinguish them are mostly policy-related. Additionally, these differences are larger in policy areas that are more important to female voters. Finally, in the fourth paper, I use cosponsorship data from across Europe to show ...

In recent years, parties in the United Kingdom have increasingly pushed for higher descriptive representation of women. To achieve this goal, Labour has introduced All-Women Shortlists, while the Conservatives have used the A-List and similar tools to promote women in their party. This article shows how All-Women Shortlists were effective at levelling the playing field between women and men, while the measures of the Conservatives did not fully achieve that effect. In fact, women are consistently nominated in less promising constituencies for the Conservatives. Nominating female candidates leads to more women being nominated in neighbouring constituencies in subsequent elections, while there is no evidence of cross-party contagion effects. Overall, these findings present strong evidence that the introduction of All-Women Shortlists started a dynamic process that consistently increased the number of female candidates and MPs for Labour, while the measures introduced by the Conservatives failed to achieve a similar effect.

AbstractWhat can policy makers do in day‐to‐day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a 'consensus heuristic', by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.

As the share of women in parliaments rises, increased attention is paid to how they substantively represent women. Meanwhile, the availability of parliamentary speech data has enabled researchers to dissect politicians' rhetorical patterns. We combine these two literatures to ask whether rhetorical differences between men and women in parliament are connected to style, policy, and preferences of women voters. We apply machine‐learning models to speeches from five West European parliaments (2000–18) to measure the femininity of the rhetoric used in each speech. Results show that women and men talk differently in parliament, and that this distinctiveness is due to both style and substance. Combining these results with public opinion surveys, we find that women MPs have the most distinctively "feminine" discourse on issues that are most salient to women in society. These findings showcase the direct connection between descriptive and substantive representation of women in contemporary democracies.

The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit manifestations of public opinion. Drawing on a database of video recordings of negotiations of the Council of the European Union and a quantitative text analysis of government speeches, we find that public opinion matters implicitly, with the exact pattern depending on governments' stance toward the EU. Pro-EU governments are responsive to public opinion in their support for compromises and attempts to stall negotiations, whereas Euroskeptic governments tend to remain silent when confronted with a public positively disposed toward the EU. Our results show that although governments implicitly represent public opinion, they do not systematically invoke their voters explicitly, suggesting the public matters but in different ways than often assumed.

The analysis of political texts from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, social media, or press releases forms the basis of major and growing fields in political science, not least since advances in "text-as-data" methods have rendered the analysis of large text corpora straightforward. However, a lot of sources of political speech are not regularly transcribed, and their on-demand transcription by humans is prohibitively expensive for research purposes. This class includes political speech in certain legislatures, during political party conferences as well as television interviews and talk shows. We showcase how scholars can use automatic speech recognition systems to analyze such speech with quantitative text analysis models of the "bag-of-words" variety. To probe results for robustness to transcription error, we present an original "word error rate simulation" (WERSIM) procedure implemented in$R$. We demonstrate the potential of automatic speech recognition to address open questions in political science with two substantive applications and discuss its limitations and practical challenges.

Comparative scholars of legislative politics continue to face the challenge of measuring a key theoretical concept: conflict at the level of legislative bills. We address this challenge with a multilingual sentiment‐based approach and show that such a measure can effectively capture different types of parliamentary conflict. We also demonstrate that an automated translation of the dictionary yields valid results and therefore greatly facilitates comparative work on legislatures. Our applications show that a sentiment approach recovers government‐opposition dynamics in various settings. The use of a simple, translatable sentiment dictionary opens up the possibility of studying legislative conflict in bill debates across languages and countries.