Archive Detail

Speaker:
Vera Troeger (University of Hamburg)

Abstract:

Much work has been done on the gender composition of parliaments but less is known about access and position of female MPs to/in parliamentary committees. These committees exert important policy-making powers in many parliamentary democracies. We show that access to committees is gendered, and women are less likely to become members and chairs of more important committees such as finance or economics. We argue that this gendered access is not merely explainable by factors such as competence (education, expertise and experience) but also due to potential self-selection and/or discrimination. We propose theoretical and empirical ways to distinguish the two. We test our arguments with unique individual level data on MPs of the German Bundestag and state parliaments since 1948. Our results show that there is gender bias in access to and composition of legislative committees that is differentially mitigated by experience, education, and expertise of MPs. Our results help linking aspects of descriptive representation of women and their ability to influence policy-decisions.

 

Vera Troeger holds the Chair of Comparative Political Science at the University of Hamburg since 2019. Her research interests lie at the intersection between international and comparative political economy, labour economics, as well as applied quantitative data analysis and political methodology. In particular she studies the impact of parental leave policies on productivity, career development, and the gender pay gap as well as economic policy diffusion and spill-overs of monetary and tax policy.