UC Merced

Women are active participants in government processes but have limited influence on female representation (OECD, 2021). While they engage in political discourse, their impact on policymaking remains limited and the gap between descriptive and substantive representation continues to persist (Childs, 2004; Dodson, 2006; Grey, 2006; Htun and Power, 2006; Vincent, 2004; Weldon, 2002). This dissertation will address this paradox with the study of legislative speeches in Pakistan. It will build on a text-as-data approach to understand gendered political communication and highlight the reasons for why female politicians continue to have less impact on female representation. The topics covered by male and female parliamentarians will be analyzed to highlight the differences in content and focus of speeches by gender.

The main experimental design depends on the variation of international scrutiny that Pakistan faced in two different time periods that will be classified as high international scrutiny (2012-13) and low international scrutiny (2022-23). A high international scrutiny period is one where a country comes under the international lens because of a domestic event that has international ramifications, for example, in terms of gender equality. I will analyze the representation of women’s interests in the parliament with an examination of speeches made by women in the years 2022-23 and 2012-13 over a period of ten months. These speeches will be studied to measure how often female parliamentarians speak, the topics they select and the engagement they receive in comparison to male leaders in politics. The data collected will be evaluated to extract a context-dependent topic analysis (Remschel and Kroeber, 2020).