Gender, Democratisation, and the European Union: Influencing Women”s Political Opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe.

The academic literature on gender and democratization highlights the three arenas of civil society, elite politics and institutional arrangements as being critical in shaping the opportunities for women's political participation. This has been confirmed during a major EU-funded research project on ‘Enlargement, Gender and Governance (EGG): The Civic and Political Participation of Women in Central and Eastern Europe’. This 10-country project seeks to shed new light on the old questions of women's political participation and representation, while taking into account the unique circumstances of democratization and Europeanisation in CEE. Drawing on EGG research data, our WPSA paper provides some novel and useful analysis into why women in the CEE region are under-represented. In particular, it examines the obstacles to women's political representation in this part of Europe and analyses the extent to which women's presence makes a difference. The paper concludes by assessing the state of women's under-representation in these emerging democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]