Institutions, Gendered Perceptions, and Frames of Meaning: Explaining Strategic Choices of Women MPs in Swedish Prostitution Policy

Previous research has shown that politics is a highly gendered field and that male and female decision-makers hold different values and engage with different issues as well. Feminist institutionalism has provided important insights concerning how a given context creates the conditions for political behavior and outcomes in respect to gender. While both formal and informal institutions have been of interest in this field of research, less attention has been directed to the perceptions actors have of the institutional context. The starting point of this article is the constructivist notion that actors’ behavior is mediated by their perceptions of the context, and it proposes that frame of meaning can be fruitfully used as an analytical concept for capturing gendered perceptions. The aim of the article is twofold. The first is to develop the notion of gendered frame of meaning as an analytical concept. The second is to investigate the strategies used by female MPs in the case of Swedish prostitution policy in order to show how gendered frames of meaning guided their strategic choices. The added value of this approach is that it furthers our understanding of how the institutional context influences actors’ behavior on the micro-level.