This article investigates the feminisation of local politics. Starting from the observation that the representation of women in local electoral politics lags behind the regional and federal level, and taking into account the relevance of local party branches in the recruitment and selection of candidates for elections, we examine the extent to which there is an ‘internal’ feminisation of local party branches and how this links to the ‘external’ feminisation of local electoral politics. Based on surveys among local party chairs, the article maps patterns of feminisation over time and across parties, investigates problems local branches encounter in the recruitment of candidates for local elections, and analyses the (attitudes towards the) measures taken to further the integration of women in local electoral politics. We conclude that internal and external feminisation do not always go hand in hand and that local politics continues to be a male-dominated political biotope.

European democracies have grown ethnically diverse in the recent years. Yet, ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in politics. Despite the theoretical argument asserting that ethnic minorities should perform better in systems allowing voters to cast intra party preferences, empirical studies bring mixed results. In particular, scholars highlight the role of both parties and voters in explaining the electoral success or failure of ethnic minority candidates. Using data on regional elections between 1995 and 2014 in Brussels, our study shows that even though parties have made gradual efforts to include ethnic minorities on their lists, voters appear to be an important force behind the election of ethnic minorities. We find variations according to party ideology, with socialist and – to a lesser extent – Christian democratic candidates benefiting the most from preferential voting. However, the positive impact of preference votes seems to decrease over time, as parties themselves become more inclusive and tend to allocate more realistic positions to their ethnic minority candidates in recent elections.

Even though gender quotas are increasingly adopted, the legitimacy of such measures remains an issue of controversy. In this contribution, we ask how MPs, i.e. the key players in the implementation and adoption of quotas, think about affirmative action, and under which conditions they find quotas to be legitimate measures for improving gender equality. Our results reveal that much variation exists as to how MPs perceive the legitimacy of quotas. This variation plays out at both the individual and the macro level. Women and left-wing MPs consider quotas to be more legitimate than men and right-wing MPs. The openness of the parliamentary arena towards women’s movement proves to be an important condition for the positive evaluation of quotas. The broader electoral and parliamentary context only has a conditional effect: it influences female MPs’ assessment of quotas but not that of male legislators.

Studies of women’s representation have often explored the link between women’s descriptive and women’s substantive representation in parliament, analyzing whether female representatives bring a unique – and often feminist – contribution to the representation of women’s interests. Doing so, however, these studies have failed to consider “how women’s substantive representation actually occurs” (Celis & Childs, 2008; Childs & Krook, 2009). Recent studies therefore propose to apply a claim-based framework, leaving open how, why and by whom women’s substantive representation occurs (Celis et al., 2008). In this article, we put this new claim-based approach to the empirical test. More in particular, we consider its added value by studying the variety of claims made about women in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives (1995-2007). We conclude that a claim-based framework indeed brings additional actors and perspectives to the fore, but that there are limits as to which claims are formulated and by whom.

The article deals with the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and the political participation of women. Firstly, it is discussed at length which political role women play in theories on Islamic fundamentalism. According to some scholars, it is indeed paramount to eliminate where possible, existing stereotypes which state that women are solely ‘placed’ in the private domain by fundamentalists. Secondly, the article examines the extent of actual political participation in a context of Islamic fundamentalism, more specifically the Islamic Republic of Iran. Models of political participation are often implicitly based on formal (electoral) forms of participation. However, women often remain invisible in these kinds of models. Consequently, the article centres on a possible broadening of the notion ‘political participation’ and the incorporation of new forms of informal political activities in the analysis of political participation.