The representation of women in government is a matter of ever greater interest in political science and is frequently now posed as a question of the relationship between descriptive representation (the number of female-bodied individuals) and substantive representation (the issues of special relevance to women and/or advocated by women's movements). Might having more women present change the nature of the issues presented, the nature of the debate that takes place about them, or the decisions finally reached about these issues? This book takes the discussion into another dimension—that of symbolic representation, arguing that symbolism is an active form of representational work and is related in specific ways to both descriptive and substantive representation.

Lombardo and Meier are two of a larger team of prolific researchers who have been analyzing the discursive politics of gender over the past decade. Their collaborative work is the fruit of two EU-funded comparative research projects known by the acronyms MAGEEQ (Mainstreaming Gender Equality) and QUING (Quality in Gender + Equality Policies), which have also given birth to at least three other books and two dozen articles with partially overlapping authorships. With multiple policy documents coded in comparable ways across nearly all EU member states, QUING in particular has proved exceptionally fecund. The underlying largely qualitative methodology of the projects is called Critical Frame Analysis (CFA). It involves extensive human coding of the speakers and ideas represented in the transcripts of policy debates, bills, and other policy advocacy and the final policies adopted, then counting mentions of certain ideas that emerge frequently (depth) and across many documents (breadth) in the coded texts, and finally questioning the presence and absence of associations among ideas and groups.

This particular contribution presents several comparisons using these CFA codes: first looking at how EU-wide framing of employment, care giving, and pay issues represents women and men in terms of their ascribed appropriate roles (or represents their identities symbolically) and then comparing Belgium and Italy in how policy symbolically legitimates only certain types of interpersonal relationships, which they frame as “intimate citizenship.” The third main comparison is between Italy and Spain in terms of the symbolic legitimation of political control over violence in policy, which the authors say frames men's violence as uncontrollable and expects women to defend themselves with only limited assistance from the state. The three forms of symbolic representation—identities, legitimacy, and political control—are presented as the major aspects (or as the authors say, functions) of symbolic representations of gender in politics. This is possibly too functionalist a framing of the work that symbolic representations do, and one could also quibble with the story they present as being about legitimacy rather than the more narrowly defined concept of citizenship rights, but overall the idea that they can be shown to do work in the polity is strongly supported by their arguments and cases.

The arguments for seeing symbolic representation as an active type of political work that produces variously effective ideas that have been sponsored by some actors and contested by others are presented as a critical extension of Hannah Pitkin's classic approach to the representation of women. Pitkin's categories of descriptive and substantive representation are widely adopted and the basic mechanisms in each are shared more than not. Lombardo and Meier suggest that symbolic representation has been relatively neglected in this body of work because Pitkin's understanding of it was too passive and too deterministic. If symbolic representation occurs passively simply because certain terms just have certain meanings, then such representations are only going to change as a result of other kinds of social change and not as an outcome of intentional struggles over meaning.

Approached as a matter of discursive politics, however, symbolic representation emerges as an arena in which alternative ideas of what gender means or what equality would look like are vehemently contested. Such ideas eventually take on a meaning in a wider public based on the relative success of a particular frame. Some become taken for granted while others look like unattainable goods because they appear to conflict with other important political ideas. If equality is thought of as meaning “absolute leveling,” for example, it is an idea that can be ridiculed, and Lombardo and Meier advocate for analyzing the specific processes of contestation by which such meanings are advocated and may become institutionalized. This focus on doing the work of making meaning is admirable, and their comparative examples leave little doubt that this sort of analysis can be done.

However, there are also some drawbacks in their presentation of this argument. In order to make the case that active work produces symbolic representations, Lombardo and Meier spend a considerable portion of the book adapting a terminology that can only appeal to incorrigible theorists. They present simple ideas (political discourses are generated by specific actors and produce specific interpretations of gender or any other concept) in terms that I found difficult to retain from chapter to chapter: the “agent,” for example, is not the producer of a discourse (this is the “maker”), and gender is the “principal” that is not represented directly but as “ideas” about it. The discourse is attributed activity by being constituted as an “agent,” but it remains unclear to me why these extra terms are needed to say something that could be said just as well directly.

I am also less impressed with their presentation of the contention over gender quotas in different countries in part because this case was not elaborated in a specific comparison between countries or even in the detail with which the general EU case was presented for employment, care, and identity. But this example also illustrates a more general problem with the thinner presentation of CFA results in this book than in some articles, since the effort to make a broad general case makes it harder for specific novel or surprising results to be emphasized. We already know, I think, that men are generally missing from discourses about care and that the Catholic Church's power as a speaker in Italian debates supports its discursive emphasis on conventional families at the expense of nontraditional unions, which are not treated discursively as legitimate and whose members are denied the rights of intimate citizenship.

I hope those involved in studies of representation and those comfortable with the formal tools of political theory will take on the authors’ challenges. The work it will take to develop a fuller account of symbolic representation is just beginning here.