Women in Politics in Italy: Between Rules, Media and Political Opportunities

Following the amendment to the Italian constitution in 2003, a number of positive actions were adopted to facilitate women’s political representation, including quotas for the elections to the European Parliament, the regional councils and the national Parliament. However, despite the increase in the number of women representatives in elected political posts, such policies mostly resulted in flawed measures. Why has this been the case? We are proposing a special issue that focuses on the tensions between the formal rules aimed at reducing the disparity between the genders in public office and the informal barriers to women’s political participation. We tackle the issue of women’s representation in politics by adopting three different but complementary perspectives. The first perspective focuses on rules and rule-making activity. Two policy instruments were recently introduced to increase women’s political representation in Italy, electoral quotas and gender-targeted public funding. Previous research has highlighted major flaws and loopholes in such policies, which have prevented their stated goals from being achieved. Focusing on electoral quotas and gender-targeted public funding measures, the research articles will contribute to a reflection on what such policies do and address the questions of how these policies have been adopted, which actors have been involved in the policy processes and how the policy processes developed, from the agenda-setting stage to policy implementation. The second perspective refers to the informal rules affecting the disparity between the genders in public office, with particular reference to Italy’s political culture, and the narrative and public discourse on women. The importance of public representations of female politicians in influencing socio-cultural and political norms has been widely acknowledged in the literature. Despite the significant female action in the third sector and the increased number of women politicians acting as potential role models, the public discourse on women in Italy still seems to reinforce gender cultural stereotypes about the role of women in society and politics. The analyses will centre on the way in which the media as well as political parties themselves persist in bringing forward the ‘public/private divide’, with the former belonging to men and the latter to women. The third perspective centres on the determinants of women’s political careers. In order to explain what accounts for women’s advancement in their political careers, the analyses will focus on the sociology of women candidates as well as on the way in which the individual political parties – the key gatekeepers for political recruitment – provide women with actual opportunities in advancing at the different stages of the political recruitment process, from eligibility, to candidacy, nomination and election. The contributions to this special issue seek to expand the research agenda on women in Italian politics, tackling the issue of women’s political representation as the result of various inter-related factors, most importantly rules, cultural norms and partisan agency.