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A new “Parity Law” was approved in Portugal in August 2006. According to that law, all candidate lists presented for local, parliamentary, and European elections must guarantee a minimum representation of 33% for each sex. This law represents a dramatic shift in the nature of political representation in Portugal, and brings the country's electoral system in line with an international tendency that favours the application of gender quotas. .x000d..x000d.This paper seeks to analyse the proximate causes that led to the adoption of gender quotas by the Portuguese National Assembly. The simple answer is that the law's passage was a direct consequence of a draft piece of legislation presented by the Socialist Party (PS), which enjoyed a majority. However, the reasons that led the PS to push through a quota law remain unclear. Using a recent survey of parliamentary elites, open-ended interviews with key women deputies from all the main Portuguese political parties, and national public opinion data, among other sources, we critically examine the three kinds of reasons that might explain the law's adoption: internal party explanations; national institutional and societal-level explanations and/or international factors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like so many nations in Asia and South East Asia, Indonesia is undertaking efforts to increase the involvement of women in government. Despite the fact that there is a small number of Indonesian female representatives in the legislative, there are hurdles that Indonesian women who wish to serve as legislators in the House of Representatives, are still facing (CETRO Database 2002). Inglehart and Norris (2003) note that with the increasing levels of modernization women are more likely to infiltrate the workforce and obtain higher levels of education. In addition, women will begin to become more politically active in the government. Given the different levels of development in the different provinces of Indonesia, we would expect to see differences in the number of women employed in the House of Representatives-DPR. More specifically, we expect the better levels of education, urbanization, and youth the region has the more open the electoral process is to women. We assume that the likelihood of women being elected to the House of Representatives in Indonesia is affected by the regions level of modernization. The higher the level of modernization the more favorable is the public opinion about women representatives. This makes it more likely for women to get elected to the House of Representatives-DPR. To test the level of Modernization in each province in Indonesia (there are 32 provinces), we look at the level of education, GDP, employment factor and the age demographics within each region. We employ an OLS regression analysis and we expect to find that the level of modernization in each province affects public opinion regarding women politicians, which in turn affects their likelihood for being elected to the DPR. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have examined the group of people who strongly oppose abortion yet support the death penalty. Those studies that have investigated the subject show that a punitive orientation toward criminal offenders and a preference for a literal interpretation of the Bible are the strongest predictors of membership in this pro-life/pro-death penalty group. The question addressed in the present paper is whether a person's gender also influences group membership: Do punitiveness and literalism have the same predictive power for both women and men, or do the predictors vary as a function of gender? The answer to this question is important for public opinion research. Policy implications are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand how descriptive representation translates into substantive representation for gender, researchers have begun to focus of the role of institutional context (Keiser et al. 2000; Kelly and Newman 2000). Keiser et al. (2000) present a framework that identifies the conditions both necessary and sufficient for descriptive representation to lead to substantive representation for gender. One of these conditions requires that the policy area should feminized. In other words, the policy output should benefit women as a class, be on the agenda of women’s interest groups or create divisions in public opinion between women and men. In recent research, Wilkins and Keiser (2002) test this hypothesis using data from child support enforcement agencies in Missouri. Our findings support the hypothesis that descriptive representation leads to substantive representation for women in feminized policy areas like child support. Furthermore, the link between descriptive and substantive representation only exists when the distributional consequences of the policy directly benefit women as a class. Specifically, we find that increases in the number of female supervisors in a field office leads to greater child support enforcement for custodial parents who do not receive government assistance. These findings are important and provide further evidence that descriptive representation can lead to substantive representation for gender, but they only provide part of the story. In this paper, I examine the causal story behind individuals and bureaucratic outputs. To achieve this objective, I conduct in-depth interviews with and surveys of Child Support Enforcement supervisors in Missouri. Using original data from the surveys, I examine how female supervisors behave differently than their male counterparts and how these differences sometimes lead to substantive representation. I conclude that female supervisors focus on different goals than their male colleagues and report spending more time supervising and reviewing cases where the collections directly benefit women. This research fills in the holes of studies (e.g., Wilkins and Keiser 2002) that focus on how the presence of female supervisors affect bureaucratic outputs, namely dollars collected for child support enforcement. Utilizing a method akin to soaking and poking, I provide a conceptually rich, individual-level causal story behind the relationship between individuals and bureaucratic outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]