Neither Penalised nor Prized: Feminist Legislators,Women’s Representation,and Career Paths in Argentina

Institutions and Career Paths

Argentina’s lower house is elected using closed-list proportional representation, with provincial-level lists. The 257-member chamber renews by halves every two years, with each deputy sitting for a four-year term. For the period of our study, 2005–2011, the 30 per cent quota required that one woman appear among every three candidates on the list, or one in every two candidates when parties or coalitions contest elections for the first time. This period also saw increasing fragmentation of the party system. The two parties that had dominated since the return to democracy in 1983 – the Partido Justicialista (PJ) and the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) – fractured and new parties emerged. The number of party delegations in the Chamber of Deputies was twenty-nine in the 2005–2007 term, thirty-three in the 2007–2009 term, and thirty-five in the 2009–2011 term (Directorio Legislativo, 2012).

Argentina permits indefinite re-election to both legislative chambers, but the re-election rate is 17 per cent, the lowest in Latin America (Jones and Micozzi, 2011: 51). Turnover occurs not because voters wish to throw the rascals out, but because party leaders do not renominate most incumbents (Rossi and Tomassi, 2012: 4). Consequently, few legislators have seniority, and congress does not cap legislators’ political careers. Argentine politicians rotate among legislative and executive positions at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. The most prized positions are provincial-level executive posts, which allow access to clientelistic resources (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014; Jones and Micozzi, 2011; Jones et al., 2002; Lodola, 2009). In fact, politicians treat congress as a short-term stop on a path aimed towards executive posts (Lucardi and Micozzi, 2016; Micozzi, 2014b). Argentine lawmakers are thus amateur legislators but professional politicians (Jones et al., 2002).

Individual legislators thus depend on party leaders for their current and future appointments to other political and party offices (Alemán et al., 2009; Jones and Hwang, 2005; Jones et al., 2002; Lodola, 2009; Micozzi, 2014b). Party discipline is high, but adherence to the party line appears most important in roll-call votes (Alemán et al., 2009). Legislators use bill authorship and co-sponsorship activity to invest in careers outside the legislature, by writing bills that target pork to their home provinces, even crossing party lines to do so (Micozzi, 2014a,b). Generally, legislators are free to express their individual views – and build their current and future reputations – through bill authorship and co-sponsorship.

Our expert survey respondents validated these research findings. Only half believed that party leaders would punish deputies who presented bills outside the parties’ agenda or cosigned bills introduced by opposition party members. By contrast, 100 per cent agreed that party leaders would punish deputies for voting against the party in the plenary. Our experts believed that leaders would punish disloyal deputies by denying prestigious committee appointments (87 per cent), blocking re-election bids (83 per cent), and withholding valuable post-congress positions (80 per cent). Since bill introduction offers legislators’ greater initial freedom, we use bill authorship and not roll call voting to identify legislators advocating for feminist or gendered interests. We then track their careers by examining their access to leadership posts in congress as well as their re-election or ascension to valuable executive positions post-congress.

Gender and Political Careers

Importantly, trends in Argentine legislators’ political careers already vary by gender. Women are far less likely than men to arrive at congress having held prestigious executive posts (governors, mayors, or cabinet ministers) and are far more likely to have held legislative posts, typically at the provincial level (Borner et al., 2009; Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014). Provincial-level legislative quotas partly explain this pattern (Borner et al., 2009), as does parties’ preference to distribute higher-value executive positions to men rather than women (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014). Yet gendered differences in types of posts do not mean differences in overall political experience, as women have as much previous political experience as men upon entering the Chamber of Deputies (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014). Low re-election rates further mean both sexes are newcomers to congress, but not politics.

Women legislators in Argentina may adjust their career expectations to fit the gendered opportunity structure. For example, women and men are equally likely to seek re-election to the federal congress, but women are less likely to aspire to higher posts after congress (Schwindt-Bayer, 2011). For women, lacking progressive ambition may constitute a rational response to limited opportunity. Further, leadership opportunities in congress and executive opportunities after congress also vary by political party, as not all parties have such spoils to distribute. Women and men depend on party leaders’ favour for their future careers, but women’s position is especially precarious: already outside elite networks, they may not risk certain stances in the legislature. On a five-point scale where one = no punishment and five = definitely punishment, experts rated advocating for women’s equality a three and demanding abortion liberalisation a four. ⁴

In summary, legislators can express their preferences through bill introduction. Ambitious women legislators might eschew women’s issues in order to remain in party leaders’ good graces. Alternatively, women legislators may understand their second-class status, and may not see representing women as making this status any worse, especially with mandate effects at work. Therefore, we expect women legislators to be more likely than men legislators to initiate bills addressing feminist or gendered issues. However, we also expect that these women legislators, and especially those women legislators adopting a feminist lens, will occupy the most marginal and least prestigious posts before, during, and after their congressional tenure.

Generating a List

We first identified which bills addressed a feminist or gendered issue. To do so, we read the title and summary of every bill. Bill authors write the title and summaries themselves, and summaries contain strategic pitches about the bill’s aim. To make the first cut, the title or the summary had to include the word “women” or “girls.” To make the second cut, the title or summary had to mention the bill’s intention to improve women’s status or well-being, following Htun and Weldon (2010). However, following Piscopo (2014a), we excluded bills exclusively aiming to improve child welfare, unless the title or the summary explicitly linked helping children to helping women. For instance, this coding process included bills that gave cash assistance to mothers with handicapped children, but excluded measures to prosecute sex crimes affecting only children.

We then classified the bills as feminist or gendered. Feminist issues meant treating women as autonomous, rights-bearing subjects in three ways: (i) liberalising access to contraception or abortion, (ii) promoting equal rights generally (i.e. non-discrimination laws or gender quotas for the judiciary), and (iii) penalising violence against women or the sex trafficking of women. Gendered issues meant addressing non-doctrinal topics or treating women as relational subjects, in four ways: (i) addressing women’s health outside of reproduction (i.e. breast cancer and anorexia), (ii) expanding employment benefits, typically maternity leave, (iii) protecting women’s family roles (i.e. conditional cash transfers based on the number of children), and (iv) expanding the welfare benefits available to pregnant women and mothers. Importantly, legislators writing gendered bills may not be feminists. Bills written to expand prenatal healthcare may have anti-abortion motivations, for instance. Yet because such bills would still provide women with social assistance, we only excluded bills that explicitly stated their anti-abortion aims.

Our coding yielded 671 discrete women-focused initiatives, both feminist and gendered, introduced by 202 individual legislators, 103 men and 99 women. Consistent with Argentina’s low re-election rates, only ten of these legislators (two men and eight women) served more than once across the four terms. Counting each deputy per election term – which we do throughout this analysis – yields 213 legislators (105 men and 108 women). ⁵ Women-focused legislators comprise 22 per cent of the roughly 900 legislators who served between 2001 and 2011. Yet not all 213 legislators show equal amounts of attention to feminist or gendered issues. The vast majority of men legislators (65 per cent) entered because they introduced just one women-focused bill per electoral term. Women legislators averaged 4.1 feminist or gendered bills per term, whereas men legislators averaged 2.2 feminist or gendered bills per term.

Given the relative freedom Argentine legislators experience vis-à-vis bill introduction, one women-focused bill – whether feminist or gendered – seems unlikely to build a legislator’s reputation. Most legislators author between five and ten bills per year, with a modal value of six. ⁶ Since every four-year electoral term corresponds to three years seated in Congress, a typical lawmaker thus authors eighteen bills. Men and women Argentine legislators have similar rates of bill authorship but different emphases, with women dedicating more time to authoring bills on women (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2008; Htun et al., 2013; Marx et al., 2007; Schwindt-Bayer, 2010). Our data reflect this trend. Assuming a modal productivity for our women-focused legislators, a woman legislator who authors eighteen bills per electoral term, 4.1 of which are women-focused, dedicates about 20 per cent of her total bill authorship time to feminist or gendered issues. By contrast, the typical man legislator who authors eighteen bills, 2.2 of which are women-focused, dedicates 12 per cent of his total bill authorship time to feminist or gendered issues.

We propose that legislators who stand out for representing women – and thus those positioned to receive punishment, if it occurs – will be legislators whose women-focused activity is above the average. Said another way, we identified five women-focused (feminist or gendered) bills per electoral term as the minimum number needed to classify the legislator as actively promoting women’s issues. Imposing this minimum reduced our data set to forty-five legislators, thirty-three women and twelve men (Supplemental Material Appendix 1). Importantly these forty-five legislators are not necessarily typical: nearly all write more than the modal number of bills, with about half introducing as many as thirty or forty bills per year. For active lawmakers, representing women is just one of many priorities.

Sorting Feminist Champions from Gender Supporters

Our forty-five legislators collectively wrote 249 feminist initiatives, compared to 153 gendered initiatives. Nineteen of the forty-five legislators focused on feminist initiatives two-thirds or more of the time, and twenty-six focused on feminist initiatives more than 50 per cent of the time. ⁷ Overall, the division of attention varies widely, from legislators with three feminist bills and two gendered bills (lower end) to those with 20 feminist bills and three gendered bills (upper end).

Given that legislators author both feminist and gendered initiatives, quantitative data alone cannot sort the legislators into the categories of “feminist champions” or “gender supporters.” Bill introduction is not the sole method of feminist advocacy – nor may it draw party leaders’ attention on its own. We asked our experts to rate legislators’ advocacy on women’s issues, to identify which legislators had reputations for supporting feminist and gendered issues.

Experts rated legislators in two ways. First, to elicit respondents’ ratings without priming, we asked experts to name up to five legislators, men or women, serving in the Kirchner era whom they viewed as “promoting feminist demands.” For each named legislator, respondents were then shown the list of feminist and gendered issues (gender equality, contraception and abortion, violence against women, women’s health, maternal health, employment protection, and general well-being) and asked to rate the frequency for which the legislator “advocated for” each issue, using a four-point scale. We defined “advocate for” as “undertaking any of the following activities: presenting or cosigning bills, participating in public activities, speaking in the media, and debating and voting for bills in committees and in the chamber.”

Second, we asked experts to rate the legislators from our quantitative list according to whether they advocated for feminist areas (defined as “the autonomy of women, defying traditional gender roles”) or gendered areas (defined as “women’s well-being, without defying traditional gender roles”). Here, we asked about the categories of feminist and gendered rather than listing the specific issues because we did not expect experts would know the exact priorities of dozens of individual deputies. To further avoid respondent fatigue, we determined that legislators introducing ten or more feminist bills – double our minimum – were clearly feminist champions, and eliminated these names from the survey. Experts therefore rated thirty-four of our forty-five women-focused legislators.

Our survey responses provided important validation of our constructs of feminist and gendered issues. We first examined whom experts named in the open-ended question. Twenty-two different legislators were named (twenty women and two men), with an average of three or fewer mentions. ⁸ Seven legislators received an above-average number of mentions (four or higher), all of whom were women. When asked for which specific issues these seven legislators advocated, 100 per cent of respondents chose “a lot” or “sometimes” for the feminist issues, and “little” or “never” for the gendered issues. Experts thus named legislators for their feminist stances. Turning to experts’ ratings of legislators from our quantitative list, we find that legislators recognised by at least one-third of our respondents (ten legislators, all women) were associated with feminist advocacy (four legislators) or gendered advocacy (six legislators). Recall, however, that experts were not shown the names of the clear feminist champions emerging from the quantitative list.

Combining our two methodologies, we sort feminist champions from gender supporters by using the expert survey ratings to validate the quantitative list. We group as feminist champions those legislators introducing ten or more feminist bills; those receiving an above-average number of expert mentions in the open-response question; or those from the quantitative list whom one-third or more experts rated as undertaking feminist advocacy. Considerable overlap existed across these criteria. Legislators introducing ten or more feminist bills also received feminist ratings from our experts, for instance. Only four legislators – Fernanda Gil Lozano, Juliana Di Tullio, Vilma Ibarra, and Victoria Donda – were categorised as feminist champions based on expert ratings alone. ⁹ Of these, only Donda authored no women-focused bills. Donda’s inclusion raised our total number of women-focused legislators to forty-six, with fifteen categorised as feminist champions and thirty-one categorised as gender supporters, as shown in Table 1 (for full names and bill counts, see Supplemental Material). Importantly, our categorisations mean that gender supporters advocate for gendered issues more than they advocate for feminist issues – but not necessarily that gender supporters are antifeminist. Our gender supporters likely represent women from differing ideological perspectives.

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Table 1.

Counts of Women-Focused Legislators by Category.

	Feminist champions	Gender supporters	Total
Women legislators	12	22	34
Men legislators	3	9	12
Total	15	31	46

Source: Authors’ bill introduction data set and expert survey rankings.

Note: One legislator who was re-elected is counted twice, once for each term.

The Paucity of Feminist Legislators

The scarcity of feminist champions is itself an important finding. Across four legislative cohorts seated during ten years, only fifteen lawmakers take enough action on women’s rights to stand out as feminists. An overwhelming proportion of feminist champions are women: twelve of fifteen (80 per cent).

Feminist champions come from all major political parties, namely the Peronist parties (especially the Kirchners’ wing, Frente para la Victoria) and the UCR, as well smaller left parties such as ARI (which later joined the Civic Coalition), the Socialist Party, and Encuentro Popular. Feminist champions do not come from smaller right parties, though a few gender supporters belong to these parties, namely Renovador de Salta and Peronismo Federal. Peronist parties account for roughly half the legislators adopting a gender perspective, reflecting their usually left-leaning platforms and greater numbers in the chamber during this period.

The scarcity of feminist legislators, combined with the fact that women-focused legislators generally write more bills than their peers, dampens expectations about systematic differences in careers. True, feminist lawmakers will stand out, becoming more readily identifiable to party leaders. At the same time, these legislators are active on many issues, and there are not enough of them to reorient parties’ agendas and to destabilise the status quo. Party leaders likely have little incentive to treat feminist legislators differently. Moreover, feminist champions from left-leaning parties, especially those from the Socialist Party, ARI/Civic Coalition, and Encuentro Popular, do not contradict their parties’ ideological principles. Latin America’s left parties may not move aggressively on feminist interests (Blofield et al., 2017), but lukewarm enthusiasm does not necessarily translate into retribution. Having some party members active on feminist issues may even serve left-leaning parties’ interests: parties may deliberately outsource feminist issues to (a few) women, thus reaping the benefits of being seen to care, without actually changing policies. Though we cannot test this hypothesis directly, the scarcity of women-focused legislators, especially feminist champions, suggests that marginalisation may not be detectable in legislators’ careers.

Pathways to Congress

Our women-focused lawmakers – like most Argentine deputies – are professional politicians but amateur legislators. Both the women and the men held previous partisan or political posts. Some also had past experience in civil society organisations, but their party resumes are clear. Though congress is not prized among Argentina’s professional politicians (Lucardi and Micozzi, 2016; Micozzi, 2014b), differences in men’s and women’s pathways to the legislature still reflect the gendered opportunity structure. Women hold legislative posts more frequently than men (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014), and this pattern repeats among our women-focused lawmakers, with more women than men arriving to the Chamber of Deputies from immediate prior service in either the federal or provincial legislatures. However, more women (fourteen) than men (six) also arrived with immediate prior service in either the federal or provincial executive, including more women (eight) who arrived having held executive posts that would have managed budgetary or clientelistic resources. This trend suggests that women may need political capital to make them attractive candidates, and that women coming directly from prestigious political positions may have the political capital available to invest in representing women.

Looking at the data proportionally, however, reveals that sex differences among women-focused legislators resemble sex differences among legislators as a whole. Between 1999 and 2009, only 33 per cent of women deputies arrived at the federal chamber having held a resource-rich post at any government level, compared to nearly 50 per cent of men deputies (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014: 103). In our more limited data set of women-focused legislators, 24 per cent of women (eight of thirty-four) previously controlled a resource-rich post, compared to 51 per cent of men (seven of twelve). Women deputies’ ranking on the electoral lists, an assignment that reflects their overall stature in the party, reveals similar trends. Generally, women deputies rarely head lists: between 1999 and 2009, women occupied just 17 per cent of list-header positions (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014: 96). Similarly, among the women-focused legislators, only 15 per cent of women (five of thirty-four ) headed their parties’ lists. The proportion was higher for men, at 33 per cent (four of twelve).

An important difference does appear when looking within the group of women-focused legislators, however. All women and men deputies with past access to clientelistic resources are gender supporters. Of the list headers, four of five women were gender supporters and three of four men were gender supporters. Here, we find suggestive evidence that feminist champions are more frequently outside the parties’ inner circles than gender supporters.

Positions in Congress

Are women-focused legislators disadvantaged or marginalised once in the Chamber of Deputies? We cannot compare the timing of bill introduction to power shifts within party delegations, but we can ask whether our gender supporters and our feminist champions occupy the “mega-seats,” meaning the leadership positions in congress (Carroll et al., 2006). We define mega-seats as membership in the Mesa Directiva (leadership table), which consists of the chamber president and the first, second, and third vice-presidents; leaders of the political party delegations (often referred to as “delegation presidents”); and chairs of legislative commissions (also called “presidents”). These mega-seats are limited in their availability, with the majority party having control over many of them, and so they are highly prized – but also unavailable to most legislators (Micozzi, 2014b), not just women-focused ones.

Since Argentina’s return to democracy, no woman has served as president of the Chamber of Deputies. Women attained this position first during the 2003–2005 congressional term. Seven women served as vice-presidents between 2003 and 2011. Of these seven women, two appeared in our data set, one feminist champion (Marcela Rodríguez) and one gender supporter (Graciela Camaño). No men in our data set held these positions.

These trends continue when looking at delegation and commission presidents. Historically, very few women have led their parties’ delegation: of the 135 delegations seated between 2001 and 2011, only 27 per cent (thirty-seven) had women presidents (Directorio Legislativo, 2012). Two of these women appear in our data set, both feminist champions (Juliana Marino and Silvia Augsburger). An additional three women, two feminist champions and one gender supporter, became delegation presidents in a future congressional period (discussed below). By contrast, no men legislators focusing on women’s issues appeared as delegation presidents in a current or future congressional period. Turning to committees, eight women in our data set led commissions during their tenure, compared to just three men. Five of the eight (two feminist champions and three gender supporters) presided over prestigious commissions, including the most important – Constitutional Affairs – as well as General Legislation, Penal Legislation, Judicial Politics, and Freedom of Expression. ¹⁰ Overall, we find evidence that women active on women’s issues, especially feminist champions, held prestigious posts, but that men active on women’s issues did not. Said another way, men legislators who represent women occupy lower ranks in the chamber.

Taken together, access to chamber, delegation, and committee presidencies echoes the patterns uncovered in women-focused legislators’ antecedents. Argentine women deputies remain under-represented in the most prestigious posts, as do women feminist champions and women gender supporters. However, several women legislators in each category do manage to access clientelist resources, head electoral lists, or occupy prestigious leadership positions. These posts are distributed among different women in our data set, meaning the prizes do not accrue to the same one or two individuals over time.

We thus find little evidence of stigmatisation or penalisation across the thirty-four women legislators who represent women. Men legislators who represent women are also not marginalised, but in the chamber they occupy absolutely and relatively fewer positions of power when compared to women legislators who represent women. Men legislators, whether feminist champions or gender supporters, do not appear among the most powerful men deputies. We thus conclude that some prestigious women deputies do represent women, perhaps because they have the political capital to do so. Most prestigious men deputies, however, do not represent women.