Stephen Holden Bates (University of Birmingham) and Alison Sealey (Lancaster University) explore the relationship between changes in the proportion of female MPs in the House of Commons and changes in the frequency of representative claims about women specifically and constituency matters more broadly at PMQs.
Prime Minister’s Questions, or PMQs for short, often gets a bad press. Much of it is well deserved and, given the choice, at least one of us would rather chew their own foot off than watch another session. However, it does also have its strengths, one of which is that it allows backbench MPs not only to raise issues that are of importance to them and/or their constituents but also, as Bevan and John (2016) point out, to drive the agendas of the front benches and change the focus of attention of the government. Moreover, it is a parliamentary institution that has remained relatively stable since 1979 and the beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, the only real major change coming in 1997 when it was switched from being a twice-weekly, 15-minute session to a once-weekly, 30-minute session.
This is the context, then, for the investigation reported in our recently published article in the European Journal of Politics and Gender, in which we use corpus techniques to analyse nearly 1.5 million words spoken by around 1400 backbenchers over approximately 1000 sessions of PMQs between 1979 and 2010. This timeframe covers seven Parliaments, 31 parliamentary sessions and two administrations: the Conservative governments of 1979–97 under Prime Ministers Thatcher (1979–90) and Major (1990–97); and the Labour governments of 1997–2010 under Blair (1997–2007) and Brown (2007–2010). This timeframe also covers a rise in the proportion of female MPs from 3.0% (the second-lowest proportion of female MPs after the Second World War) to 19.8%. The key time point was 1997, which saw the number of female MPs double.
Drawing on existing academic literature on the descriptive and substantive representation of women, we explore in the article the relationship between, on the one hand, changes in the proportion of female MPs in the House of Commons and changes in government and, on the other, changes in the frequency of representative claims about women specifically and constituency matters more broadly. To do this, we focus on three linguistic traces of broad trends concerning representation: the word women, the semantic domain[1] ‘people: female’, and variants of the word constituency.
Some of what we found was unsurprising, but some results were more unexpected.
With regard to the substantive representation of women, in the not-so-surprising category, we found that female MPs spoke more often about women than their male counterparts did, whatever the proportion of female MPs in the House of Commons.
In the pretty-surprising category, we found, against expectations, that the sharp increase in the proportion of female MPs in 1997 and the switch from a Conservative to a Labour government had no discernible impact on the propensity of MPs in general to talk about women. There was more talk about women – but only because there were more female (Labour) MPs. Female MPs were not more likely to talk about women post-1997, and nor, overall, were their male counterparts emboldened to talk about women more because of the increased presence of female MPs in the Commons. These results, then, point towards the importance of gendered institutional design, in this instance, concerning the traditionally masculine, ritualistic aspects of Prime Minister’s Questions (Lovenduski, 2012) in shaping and constraining parliamentary behaviour.
With regard to constituency talk, our results were more as expected. In general, women have been found to focus politically more on the local level (Coffé, 2013) and to give a higher priority to constituency work within legislatures than men (Norris and Lovenduski, 1995). Reflecting these differences, we found that critical actors concerning representative claims about constituents and constituencies are female MPs, and that increases in female representation above 15% in 1997 coincided with a curvilinear increase in such talk among all backbenchers. These findings suggest that, post-1997, female MPs may have changed the culture of PMQs and, possibly, the House of Commons more broadly, at least in this regard.
Stephen Holden Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. Follow him on Twitter: @Stephen_R_Bates
Alison Sealey is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK.
This blog draws on research from Bates and Sealey (2018) Representing women, women representing: backbenchers’ questions during Prime Minister’s Questions, 1979–2010, European Journal of Politics and Gender, Volume 2, Number 2, June 2019, pp. 237-256(20) Read the full article.
[1] A semantic domain is a group of ‘word senses that are related by virtue of their being connected at some level of generality with the same mental concept’ (Archer et al, 2002). So, in this case, the semantic domain ‘people: female’ includes words such as women, girl, suffragette, lady, etc.