This insightful volume contributes to our understanding of women's numerical and substantive representation in national legislatures around the world. Specifically, it focuses on a full array of dimensions of women's political presence: obstacles to women's entrance into parliament, policy mechanisms to improve women's underrepresentation, and the policy impact of growing numbers of women in national politics. Chapter authors draw evidence from a variety of sources—aggregate data on percentages of women in parliament, cabinets and political parties, surveys of political elites and public opinion, and in-depth interviews with party officials.
This volume stands apart from previous studies of women and parliament for its wide geographical lens. The selection of case studies goes beyond the often-studied nations of Western Europe and North America to include economically developing and recently democratized countries from five continents. Individual chapters cover Indonesia, Hungary, Italy, France, Ireland, Peru, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Canada, Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, Scandinavia, and a comparison of 43 nations in sub-Saharan Africa.
Sharing Power is also unique in its comprehensive theoretical outlook. For example, studies will often focus on the role of electoral systems in facilitating women's representation, or on the role of political parties, yet rarely are these factors considered together. Each country-level chapter incorporates a full array of factors that impact women's parliamentary presence: electoral rules, political parties, candidate gender quotas, the women's movement, the state, gender attitudes, and socioeconomic forces. International forces, such as the role of the European Union and the United Nations are mentioned in a few chapters, including the Swiss and Hungarian cases, and this would seem to be an important route for future cross-national research. Among the chapters focusing on newer democracies, democratic transitions appear more favorable for women in the political arena in Spain and Indonesia, and less favorable in Hungary and Croatia.
Several core themes recur through multiple chapters. It is important to note that the integral role of political parties in either promoting or hindering women's advances is highlighted in the cases of Hungary, Italy, France, Ireland, Croatia, Switzerland, and Australia and New Zealand. Similarly, bipartisan women's caucus groups facilitate women's numerical and substantive gains in Indonesia, Italy, sub-Saharan Africa, the UK, and the Netherlands. In addition, “critical acts” of pioneering women often emerge as catalysts for increasing women's political power. Several authors note the importance of women, such as Megawati Sukarnoputri, Simone Veil, Helen Clark, and Jadranka Kosor, in Indonesia, France, New Zealand, and Croatia, respectively.
The volume demonstrates that formal rules to heighten women's political presence have diffused around the world. Gender quotas have been legislated at the national level in countries as diverse as France, Peru, and Djibouti. At another level, voluntary party quotas have been adopted in Africa, Scandinavia, Indonesia, Hungary, Spain, Australia, Ireland, Canada, and the UK.
Chapters on Hungary and Spain challenge our assumptions about the impact of electoral rules on women's representation. Both cases suggest that proportional representation and higher district magnitudes are not always more favorable to women. Indeed, electoral rules are embedded in a wider set of institutions, and these must be taken into consideration holistically to understand fully the cross-national variation in women's parliamentary presence.
Another important contribution of the book lies in its cross-national perspective on women's influence within parliaments. The evidence from these chapters is mixed. Taken together, the cases seem to suggest that most women legislators share some common idea that they “stand for women” and that higher proportions of women in parliament can shift the political agenda toward issues that more directly touch their lives, such as equal opportunity laws, women's health, violence against women, and family policies.
Sharing Power is well written, informative, and comprehensive. It will interest scholars of comparative politics generally, and of legislative studies, political recruitment, women and politics, and/or gender and politics more specifically. For those aiming to take stock of the comparative literature on women in parliament, it is an invaluable resource. Furthermore, because each chapter includes a brief overview of the political and party system, and the tables are quite accessible, this volume would be quite useful in courses on comparative politics, and in courses that look at politics through a gendered lens.
The book poses as many puzzles as it solves, and will spur future research. The take-home message is that explanations for women's increasing levels of political power are contingent on a complex blend of national attitudes toward gender roles; historical, political, and institutional context; party incentives and electoral forces; and the leadership of women already in power. Illustrative of this theme, the conclusions of individual country chapters offer mixed prospects for women's advancement in politics in the near future. For example, although the picture appears bleak in Indonesia and Hungary, it seems considerably brighter in Switzerland and the Netherlands. For all of the core themes, the reader is left with the sense that strong cross-national variation remains the best description of women's political inclusion and ability to transform national politics.
