Dynasts or Disruptors: Gender and Representation in the Philippines Legislature

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to explore in-depth whether the identity of elected agentsmeasurably contributes to the goal of achieving more representative democracies. The push for more diverse legislatures is one of the most significant global reform efforts of the twenty-first century with more than 150 countries having adopted measures to facilitate or require increased gender, racial, or ethnic diversity in their national legislatures since 1990. Yet, there is still no scholarly consensus on the substantive effects of increased diversity in legislatures. Though an expansive and growing literature on diversity in representation has identified a broad range of possible effects, the consensus is that the relationship between increased descriptive diversity (in any form) and substantive outcomes is not straightforwardly deterministic, but rather weak, probabilistic, and contingent on a number of other institutional, contextual, and individual factors (Dodson 2006; Celis and Childs 2014; Espírito-Santo, Freire, and Serra-Silva 2020). Still, scholars view the study of the descriptive-substantive link as worthwhile and maintain that diversity of identity is relevant to the study of political representation (Mackay 2008; Wängnerud 2009). With this complexity and the difficulty of detecting measurable effects in mind, this project takes a broad, exploratory approach to evaluate a wide array of potential consequences that increased diversity in the legislature might engender in a context that has received scant attention, the Philippines. This project offers three innovations. First, I take a ‘thick’ view of representation (Mackay 2008) drawing on literatures from feminist theory, social psychology, feminist institutionalism, and diversity in representation, to identify and evaluate a wide range of potential impacts that more diverse legislatures might have. Second, I develop a novel Pathways Framework for categorizing and studying the potential avenues through which diversity in representation might exert a substantive influence on policies, populations, and parliaments. Third, I test this broad range of existing theories in a context that I argue is a least-likely case study and therefore provides a novel and informative testing ground for these theories. My goal is not to demonstrate causality per se, but rather to determine if empirical evidence in support of a relationship between descriptive diversity and substantive outcomes, broadly construed, can be detected in a least-likely context. Using the Pathways Framework, I take a sustained, holistic approach to examining the potential consequences of women’s growing presence in the legislature over time. Though I find limited support that women’s increased presence in the legislature measurably influences policy outcomes or women’s exposure to harm, as measured by two comprehensive indices, I uncover multiple ways that women legislators consistently advocate for and act on behalf of women at greater rates than men. These findings add to the feminist institutionalism literature by demonstrating that, while women continue to be disadvantaged in the context of historically male-dominated institutions, they are nonetheless able to innovate and bring valuable perspectives to the policymaking table, which challenge dominant gender norms and advance the interests of women and other marginalized groups.