| My dissertation uses the case of women in the Bundestag (Germany's lower legislative house) to foreground the tension between liberal democratic conceptions of political representation and identity-based representation. Unlike previous research, which has focused on establishing that female legislators advocate for women at greater rates than their male colleagues, I focus on variation among women. I show that party affiliation's contribution to the variation among female legislators' attention to women's interests is not as strong as previous research has found, once we account for parties' varying conceptions of what these interests are. Instead, several social markers in the German context (motherhood and marriage) as well as generational differences (in the form of cohort effects) distinguish among female legislators and contribute to understanding who will be more likely to advocate for women.;In establishing this argument, I use material from interviews with 54 female and male members of the Bundestag and biographical information about the 340 women in the Bundestag between 1998-2009, as well as original content analyses of party platforms and parliamentary debate transcripts from three legislative terms (composed of 360 speeches across 40 debates, addressing 21 laws, spanning 1998-2008). |
