Seminar:
Gender, Dynastic Ties, and Representational Style in Legislatures - Nam Pham and Daniel M. Smith (University of Pennsylvania)
14:00-15:00 (GMT) Wednesday, September 17.
Please join our mailing list (opens in a new window)here to receive bi-weekly invitations to all events. All events take place at UCD and are also live-streamed on Zoom.
Abstract: Conventional wisdom is that women in politics tend to focus more on programmatic policies and less on particularistic policies than their male counterparts. We argue that this pattern may be attenuated in the case of political dynasties, as female successors may rely on the reputations and networks of male predecessors to win election, and accordingly adopt their predecessors’ more particularistic representational styles. We explore how gender and legacy connections shape the legislative focus of members of parliament (MPs) in Japan using a keyword-assisted topic model applied to millions of parliamentary speeches. Our preliminary analysis shows that legacy women MPs more closely resemble the representational styles of their (male) kin predecessors, compared to both legacy men and MPs of either sex who follow non-kin predecessors. The speeches of legacy women MPs also contain more particularistic content compared to those of non-legacy women (but contain more programmatic content compared to legacy men). These findings highlight how the expected representational outcomes from women’s entry into politics may be conditioned by the pathways they take into power.
About the speaker(s): Minh Nam Pham (Nam) is a PhD student at the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies a range of topics in comparative and international political economy, focusing on distributive politics and state-business relations. Before joining Penn, Nam earned a Master of International Affairs (MIA) from the University of California, San Diego , and a BA in International Social Sciences from the University of Tsukuba.
Daniel M. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests cover a range of topics in comparative politics, political economy, and political behavior, with a core focus on political institutions and democratic representation. He is the author of Dynasties and Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2018), and articles appearing in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics, among other journals and edited volumes. He holds a PhD and MA in political science from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in political science and Italian from the University of California, Los Angeles.