Work in progress/ Research projects
The Swedish Parliament as a Gendered Workplace
Research Project funded by Forte (2019-2023) with Josefina Erikson (Uppsala University)
The Swedish Riksdag is known for being one of the world’s most gender equal legislatures. Yet, beyond the high share of women MPs and women’s documented impact on policy, we know little about what obstacles and opportunities men and women face in their work as political representatives. The scholarship on gender and legislatures has mainly focused on explaining the variation in the numbers of women MPs elected or on what impact women MP’s have on policy output. This project approaches political representation from a new perspective, viewing the legislature as a gendered workplace. Drawing on institutional theory and organizational research, we will develop how to conceive of and study working conditions in legislatures from a gender perspective. The starting point is that MPs’ possibilities to conduct their parliamentary duties and act in the legislature on equal terms is conditioned by aspects of the workplace such as power relations, formal and informal rules and norms, and gendered scripts about how one shall appear and act. Based on our conceptualization of the legislative work environment, we will explore if and how the working conditions for men and women differ in the Riksdag and how working conditions influence male and female legislators’ performance. We will take a multidisciplinary point of departure and use a mixed-methods approach including interviews with legislators, direct observations in the Parliament and statistical analyses of survey, debate, and performance data. This project is not only theoretically novel, it also provides the most comprehensive empirical investigation of the inner workings in the Riksdag from a gender perspective to date. While the project contributes with new insights to research on gender and parliaments, it is also highly relevant for the broader society. Gender equal working conditions in the parliament are imperative from a democratic perspective as well as of symbolic importance in the efforts towards a more gender equal society.
Gender and Political Representation in a (Post-) Pandemic Era: How the Increased Salience of Health and Poverty Issues has Affected Women's Political Inclusion and Power in Low-Income Countries
Research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (2022-2025) with Amanda Clayton (Vanderbilt University) and Pär Zetterberg (Uppsala University)
The current global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented global health crisis and propelled nations into new poverty crises, jeopardizing hard-won development gains in the world’s most vulnerable countries. These twin public health and poverty crises in low-income countries are intimately connected to policy domains that tend to be prioritized by women citizens and politicians: public health and poverty alleviation. In this project, we ask what happens when a global crisis suddenly shifts global attention towards issues historically prioritized by women. More specifically, this project explores the pandemic’s impacts on (1) the presence of women in political decision-making (descriptive representation) and on (2) the policy priorities and legislative behavior of men and women political leaders (substantive representation) in low-income countries. To address these issues, we use an innovative and ambitious mixed-method approach. We propose five separate studies, including quantitative analyzes of changes in women's numeric representation and budget allocations in low-income countries, analyses of legislative speech data from thirteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a comparative case study of Malawi and Zimbabwe, and survey experiments with citizens in these two countries to gauge how citizens' demands for women politicians have been affected by the pandemic.
What does it take to make leadership gender equal? Studies of political leadership in a gender balanced context
Research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (2023-2026) with Josefina Erikson and Sandra Håkansson (Uppsala University)
In a wide variety of male-dominated political contexts, research has found evidence of gender stereotypes and masculine coded leadership ideals, which appear to undermine women’s perceived suitability as well as their authority as top political leaders. Yet, knowledge is lacking on how and under what conditions political leadership ideals become less masculine-coded, and how that would affect women leaders in practice. Despite women’s increasing political representation worldwide, political leadership and gender has to date mostly been studied in heavily male-dominated contexts. Knowledge needs to be updated on leadership ideals and the conditions facing women political leaders in more gender-balanced contexts. This project contributes to filling this gap through a series of studies on leadership ideals and conditions for exercising leadership in Swedish politics using interviews and surveys with politicians, a survey experiment, and quantitative text analysis of parliamentary instruments for scrutiny of ministers. Taking existing theory as our starting point, we examine how leadership ideals are constructed in a gender balanced context and what implications that has for men’s and women’s political leadership in practice. The project contributes knowledge about a largely unstudied question of high relevance for democracy: to what extent do conditions for women improve as male dominance in politics decreases.