Women's descriptive representation in national parliaments

Abstract

This dissertation studies the descriptive (i.e. numeric) representation of women in national parliaments in three related but independent papers. The empirical analysis presented in the papers is based on two original data sets. The first, macro level data set covers the democratic elections of 75 nations between the years 1980 and 2010. A subset of these data covering the OECD nations is augmented to include a set of socioeconomic variables that were not available for other countries. The second data set is a collection of candidate data from six Estonian elections between the years 1992 and 2011. The papers use a variety of quantitative techniques to support the theoretical claims made in them.