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Representation of Women in the Parliament of the Weimar Republic: Evidence from Roll Call Votes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2014

Marc Debus  and
Martin Ejnar Hansen
Marc Debus
Affiliation:
University of Mannheim
Martin Ejnar Hansen
Affiliation:
Brunel University
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Abstract

In modern democracies, the representation of voter interests and preferences is primarily the job of political parties and their elected officials. These patterns can, however, change when the issues that are at stake concern the interests of social groups represented by all relevant parties of a political system. In this article we focus on the behavior of female MPs in the parliament of Weimar Germany and, thus, on a parliament where legislative party discipline was very high. On the basis of a dataset containing information on the legislative voting behavior of MPs, we show that gender, even when controlling for a battery of further theoretically derived explanatory factors, had a decisive impact on the MPs' voting behavior on a law proposal to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 341 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2014 

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