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With its consistently higher levels of women’s representation than the average EU member state’s parliament, the European Parliament (EP) is often touted as a role model of gender parity. Longitudinal trends of shares of women elected to the EP have been increasing over time and show no sign of being restricted by a glass ceiling. We know surprisingly little about the reasons why women perform better in EP elections and, more importantly, whether these opportunities have translated into positional leadership opportunities for women. In this chapter, we investigate patterns of descriptive representation between countries and over time and identify current hurdles to women’s access to the EP. Additionally, we examine how presence transfers into leadership positions, thus contributing to the study of women’s positional leadership in parliamentary contexts. Our investigation reveals a paradox: while the EP is an exceptional success story for the access of women to elected office, the ostensible absence of an upper limit to representation does not entail unlimited vertical mobility for female MEPs. The proportion of women heading committees has remained lower than that of men and the distribution of women in committees follows a gendered pattern. Female MEPs are more likely to head or participate in committees that can be described as “feminine” in substance, while influential committees are still male dominated.

This article investigates gender gaps in political knowledge by exploiting a pooled dataset containing the four modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, thereby allowing the comparison of seven different measurements of political knowledge, the most comprehensive comparison to date. The paper’s findings are threefold. First, the two conventional types of political knowledge—factual or placement knowledge—belong to different latent constructs and are not interchangeable. Second, most factual knowledge scales produce important variations in the size of gender gaps across and within countries over time. Third, “don’t know” as an incorrect response generally leads to broader gender gaps, given men’s higher propensity to guess.

Objective. Scrutinize how the three main sources of knowledge inequalities, namely, gender, age, and education, relate to the content, format, and object of the survey items used to measure knowledge., Methods. Using a pooled data set encompassing 106 postelection surveys in 47 countries from the CSES, we perform analyses by stacking the data at the question level., Results. Questions probing familiarity with electoral and partisan politics provide knowledge gaps of a higher magnitude. However, our balanced comparison of the three gaps also confirms the peculiarities of the gender gap in knowledge previously portrayed by the bulk of the literature., Conclusion. Surveys aspiring to measure citizens’ knowledge about the political world in a valid manner should include items inquiring about different substantive contents, and not only elections or partisan politics as the available postelectoral surveys around the world currently do. They also should use closed-ended format with at least four possible options, and should maximize the object of inquiry, so that the cognitive abilities required to correctly answer the questions are diverse and the measurement does not favor one over the others.

This article investigates the representation of women on the three subnational levels of government in Germany from 1995 to 2013, drawing on a novel data collection. Although longitudinal trends point to an overall increase on the national level, we find large variations—both upturns and downturns—from one election to the next on the state, district, and municipal levels. Our results suggest that a saturation point in women’s representation in subnational assemblies, located around 25%, largely accounts for these fluctuations. Assemblies featuring a high proportion of female officeholders before an election are more likely to experience stagnation and declines in subsequent elections. Legislatures with a low share of female representatives prior to an election, by contrast, experience the largest positive changes in their proportion of women. These findings contradict established theories that lead us to expect women’s representation to follow a self-reinforcing process, with parity as an end point. Rather, we find that women hit a ‘glass ceiling’ far sooner.

Although there are considerably more men than women in most parliaments around the world, we know little about whether male-dominated legislatures neglect women’s policy preferences. Our article addresses this gap by analysing the congruence of policy preferences between women, men and their elected representatives. We endeavour to answer two questions. Are women’s policy preferences underrepresented in modern democracies? If so, which factors explain the size of the gender gaps in policy preference congruence? Comparing 21 European countries, we show that women’s preferences actually tend to be more accurately represented in parliaments than those of men. Moreover, our analyses reveal that this unanticipated finding is not driven by the share of female office-holders, but rather by levels of women’s turnout, which leads us to conclude that who votes is more important than who represents for policy preference congruence.

Women’s representation is highest in local assemblies in some countries, while others display the largest share of female office-holders at the national level. Drawing on a new data set mapping the representation of women at all four levels of government in Germany during the 2000s, we argue that differences in party system configurations across echelons explain these distinct patterns and provide evidence for this claim. We show that left-wing parties, the main source of female office-holders, perform better at higher echelons, while minor parties and independent representatives, which favour male candidacy, win more seats at the lowest levels of government.

Women's representation in elected assemblies across varying levels of government is often theorised to be shaped as a pyramid, with the highest proportion of women at the local level, where barriers to entry are minimal. Mapping women's representation in Germany, however, we find contradictory evidence, since the pyramid is spun on its head. Looking at the representation of women in legislatures across three levels of government reveals relatively few women in district assemblies, but sizably higher proportions at the Land and federal levels. This pattern presents a challenge to conventional explanations of descriptive representation at the local level.

Drawing on an original dataset covering more than 100 political parties in over 20 European Union Member States, this article analyses how political recruitment procedures affect the proportion of women nominated on party lists in the context of the 2009 European Parliament elections. The findings show that the inclusiveness of the selectorates in the early stage of candidate selection processes is a key determinant of the representativeness of lists regarding their gender composition. Moreover, it is found that neither territorial centralisation nor the inclusiveness of the selectorate in the later stage of candidate selection play a significant role. The key to the puzzle, therefore, lies in the composition of the initial pool of potential candidates and those who make initial nominations.

Previous research has shown that voters’ perception of electoral fairness has an impact on their attitudes and behaviors. However, less research has attempted to link objective measurements of electoral integrity on voters’ attitudes about the democratic process. Drawing on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Quality of Elections Data, we investigate whether cross-national differences in electoral integrity have significant influences on citizens’ level of satisfaction with democracy. We hypothesize that higher levels of observed electoral fraud will have a negative impact on evaluations of the democratic process, and that this effect will be mediated by a respondent’s status as a winner or loser of an election. The article’s main finding is that high levels of electoral fraud are indeed linked to less satisfaction with democracy. However, we show that winning only matters in elections that are conducted in an impartial way. The moment elections start to display the telltale signs of manipulation and malpractice, winning and losing no longer have different effects on voter’s levels of satisfaction with democracy.

For the very first time in EU history, the 2014 EP elections provided citizens with the opportunity to influence the nomination of the Commission President by casting a vote for the main Europarties’ ‘lead candidates’. By subjecting the position of the Commission President to an open political contest, many experts have formulated the expectation that heightened political competition would strengthen the weak electoral connection between EU citizens and EU legislators, which some consider a root cause for the EU’s lack of public support. In particular, this contest was on display in the so-called ‘Eurovision Debate’, a televised debate between the main contenders for the Commission President broadcasted live across Europe. Drawing on a quasi-experimental study conducted in 24 EU countries, we find that debate exposure led to increased cognitive and political involvement and EU support among young citizens. Unfortunately, the debate has only reached a very small audience.

The link between a strong state and democratic institutions is becoming a well-established finding. Despite mounting empirical evidence mapping the existence of such a connection, very few contributors have been able to propose a mechanism through which this dynamic operates, hence thwarting attempts to establish a causal direction. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by linking post-independence levels of state capacity with the strength of presidents, an institutional feature already hypothesized to have strong effects on democratization efforts. Using 26 post-communist countries over the period 1989-2009, I argue that state capacity, understood as ‘the institutional capacity of a central state, despotic or not, to penetrate its territories and logistically implement decisions’ (Mann 1993: 59) affects democratization processes by shaping the level of concentration of power in the hands of executives.

State power is usually defined as a concept encompassing two components: one is the infrastructural and administrative aspect of power; the other is the despotic or coercive power of the state. Hence, states can be strong in two different ways. Several scholars have emphasized the importance of infrastructural state capacity for democratization, and some even go so far as to suggest that infrastructural state capacity is a necessary condition for democracy. A different branch of literature has argued that coercive state capacity has been effective in sustaining autocracy and thwarting democratization. Despite mounting evidence supporting the roles of infrastructural and coercive state capacity to explain the emergence or the absence of democracy in various countries, no study to date has systematically considered the connection between these two types of state capacity. This article proposes to fill this gap by examining the relationship between infrastructural and coercive state capacity drawing on vario...

The European Parliament (EP) has one of the highest proportions of women in its ranks, with over a third in 2009. Although previous research has pointed to the use of proportional representation (PR) in European elections as ‘friendlier’ to women, few have looked at differences in the types of PR rules in use in each country. In this article, we argue that the conventional wisdom according to which institutional design—the choice of electoral rules—should shape the composition of the EP does not hold, and suggest that the well-documented empirical connection between electoral rules and descriptive representation might in fact be an endogenous rather than a causal relationship.

Cross-sectional research designs show that proportional representation (PR) tends to produce more equitable outcomes in terms of gender representation. While existing research provides valuable insights into the covariates of gender representation, such cross-sectional designs fail to provide a definitive test of the influence of electoral rules both over time and in the case of mixed systems. Addressing this gap, this article proposes a longitudinal research design using the case of Germany, because half the Bundestag’s seats are allotted through majoritarian first-past-the-post methods, while the other half are allotted through proportional methods. The main findings point towards heavy interaction between the two electoral tiers that becomes visible in party quotas, double nominations and increased competitiveness of female candidates.

While effective state capacity can reasonably be considered a necessary condition for democratization, strong states do not automatically produce democratic regimes, nor do they guarantee their survival. Far from being sufficient conditions for democracy, strong or capable states are also thought to be indispensable for the maintenance of autocratic rule. The present article puts to the test the hypothesis that a certain level of state capacity is needed to engage in effective electoral malpractice, using general and more specific indicators of electoral fraud. This article proposes two opposing mechanisms through which state capacity can influence the quality of elections: through infrastructural state capacity and coercive state capacity. The article demonstrates that electoral fraud is more likely in countries where infrastructural state capacity is weak and that coercive state capacity plays a more ambiguous role than previously thought. The analyses also reveal that different factors are at work when...

While a consensus is emerging about the importance of state building and state capacity for democratization in both post-communist and developing countries, comparatively few explicit attempts have been made to provide empirical support for the relationship between the two concepts. Even more problematic is to find an explicit causal mechanism linking high state capacity with democracy. State capacity can be understood as the capability of the state to penetrate society, regulate social relations, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways. In other words, strong states have high capabilities to complete these tasks, while weak states struggle to compete with private actors over extraction and appropriation of resources. But what makes strong states more likely to be democratic and, in turn, weak states less likely to be democratic? This article explores whether or not state capacity correlates with the outcomes of founding elections, that is, the first open elections in post-communist countries. In other words, do voters in states with higher initial capacity also tend to “throw the communist rascals out” in the founding elections? (author's abstract)