Breaking Down Stereotypes by Realizing Women’s Interests: Gender and Its Impact on Legislative Consensus

Abstract

The presence of women in legislatures has steadily increased over the past 2 decades, prompting numerous studies to explore the role of women in politics. This article focuses on Spain to analyze how women contribute to parliamentary consensus, a rarely explored but necessary topic in times of polarization and political conflict. The combination of aggregated and member of parliaments’ individual-level data provides a holistic approach to assessing how women operate in legislatures and their predisposition to political conflict. Aggregated findings show that an increase in female political representation does not go hand in hand with more legislative consensus, only when gender laws are approved. Similarly, the individual-level results show the importance of political parties in shaping attitudes toward conflict. Female parliamentarians present less consensual attitudes in the most extreme ideological parties: Podemos and VOX. However, no gender differences exist in the mainstream parties of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) and PP (People’s Party). These findings also highlight the institutional and party barriers that women may face when developing their “know-how” in politics.