Gender Equality And Party Politics

It is necessary to carry out the research of British women’s political participation, which is always ignored by domestic political scientists. Studying the women’s political participation in Britain provides a new research perspective and a supporting case for the mainstream theory of political participation, as well as reconciles feminist political science with political science. Additionally, exploring the procedure and logic of women’s political participation under the background of party politics, this research provides distinctive materials which helps examining how actually the liberal democracy operates in Britain, and it is conducive to understand what influence has "gender" engendered on party politics. Besides, the research is propitious to give strategical implications on establishing and improving an orderly women’s political participation. Thus, this research focuses on women’s political participation in Britain as a study case by taking the analysis framework of feminist institutionalism. In summary, this research suggests that the pattern of women’s political participation in Britain is the product of dual variation of gender equality and party politics, in other words, the concept of gender equality and the gendered party politics are two most important elements that influence the women’s political participation, which underpins the theoretical analysis framework. Applying this framework to describe and analysis the evolution of women’s political participation in Britain during the past one and half century objectively, this article discuss the interaction among gender equality, political participation and party politics under the perspective of gender politics, and combined with abundant data and figures, the research makes three main conclusions as follows:First of all, the feminism debate of equality and difference complicates the connotation of gender equality, regarding to its variation, women have put forward a series of new political demands continuously, including equal education, equal pay, body liberation, family allowance, protecting the rights of non-heterosexual and minority women, the political representation of women and so on, these sets new goals for women’s political participation and have a result of its expanding. Second, there are various obstacles to women’s political participation under the circumstance of gendered party politics, but political parties have to respond to women’s demands which eventually feminised themselves. This requires us to examine the parties differ in their policies to represent women, including both the programmatic and organizational dimensions of representation. Third, the form of women’s political participation becomes diversification, from a kind of social movement to three main forms including feminisms, institutional participation and politics, with which the scale of feminisms has shrank as well as the importance of women MPs have improved. Forth, in respect of the political representation of women, the new elected101new labour women MPs apparently seek to acting for women’s interest better than their men colleagues, but the relationship between descriptive representation and substantive representation remain unconfirmed, for the gendered circumstance of parliament limits the role of women MPs.