Why Aren't They There? The Political Representation of Women, Ethnic Groups and Issue Positions in Legislatures

Women and ethnic minorities are significantly underrepresented in parliaments across the world. In his book Why Aren't They There? The Political Representation of Women, Ethnic Groups and Issue Positions in Legislatures Didier Ruedin aims to explain this inequality. The book studies the relation between descriptive representation, understood as the numerical presence of a particular group, and substantive representation, defined as policy preferences and issue positions. It makes three key contributions. First, it studies the relation between two forms of representation that are, as the author rightly argues, too often isolated in empirical research. Secondly, while scholarship on the underrepresentation of women in national legislatures is strongly developed, studies addressing ethnicity as an analytical variable in political representation is still a fledging field in which single country studies are the norm. More importantly, while it is often assumed that processes of political inclusion and exclusion work in similar ways for women and ethnic minorities, few studies have actually tested this hypothesis. Thirdly, unlike many previous studies, Ruedin takes into account the influence and interdependence of both cultural and institutional factors, referring to prevalent attitudes towards women and ethnic minority groups in different societies and aspects of the electoral system, respectively. In this way Ruedin positions himself firmly within the current developments within the study of political representation in which traditional work is challenged or complemented and adapted by the inclusion of novel conceptual approaches (e.g. Saward, 2010) and the focus on groups that have been overlooked earlier (e.g. Bird et al., 2011).