Gendering Gamson's Law. Issue 4 (December 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Scherpereel, John A.; Adams, Melinda; Hayes, Katherine
• Is Part Of: Politics & gender. Volume 17:Issue 4(2021)
• Page Start: 775
• Page End: 798
• Publication Date: 2021-12
• Subjects: Sex role -- Political aspects -- Periodicals; Women in politics -- Periodicals; 320.082
• DOI: 10.1017/S1743923X20000203
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1743-923X

Abstract

Abstract: Which factors explain variation in the gendered composition of governing cabinets? To address this question, we transpose the idea of proportionality between legislative seat shares and cabinet seats shares from studies of the partisan composition of cabinets to studies of the gender composition of cabinets. Gamson's law identifies a strong association between the proportion of legislative seats a party contributes to a governing coalition and the proportion of seats the party receives in the cabinet. We attempt to gender Gamson's law. We develop a theory of why a gendered Gamson's logic should apply to cabinets in parliamentary systems. We test our intuition via analysis of a new dataset covering 18 OECD parliamentary systems from 1990 through early 2019. We find a strong relationship between the gendered distribution of seats in governing parties' parliamentary delegations and the gendered distribution of seats in the cabinets those parties create.