She as Citizen: Female Parliamentarians and the Emergence of Social Citizenship

Ziel

Welfare state development and democratization are among the defining institutional transformations of the era, yet women remain marginalized in historical accounts of social citizenship. We still lack a clear account of how institutions evolved to grant women economic autonomy from market and marital dependence, or what shaped that development. In the absence of systematic investigation, women have been portrayed as recipients rather than architects of welfare state development. To replace assumptions with evidence, the project focuses on female representation as a key pathway to the emergence of women’s social citizenship. Bringing women’s perspectives into the legislative arena may have been decisive, especially at critical junctures when parties competed for the newly enfranchised women. This project addresses the following research question:

How did female parliamentarians translate women’s interests into party policy positions after suffrage across advanced capitalist countries, and with what effects on women’s social citizenship?

SheCitizen investigates the agenda-setting role of female parliamentarians in building women’s social citizenship. Covering 18 advanced capitalist countries from 1883 to 1980, it combines time-series cross-sectional analyses linking female representation to policy outcomes with in-depth quantitative analyses of parliamentary debates in Germany, Sweden, and the United States to map policy positions and trace whether and how female parliamentarians shifted party positions across institutional settings. This project is groundbreaking, as it is the first systematic study to center female agency in the emergence of social citizenship and advances a bold, evidence-based reframing of comparative welfare history. By reconstructing trajectories, elevating key actors, and pinpointing turning points, it closes a critical gap and replaces male-centered narratives with a general account grounded in women’s political action.

Wissenschaftliches Gebiet (EuroSciVoc)

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