Center for the Study of Democracy

I test seven explanations the function of gender in parliamentarian support for abortion policy by comparing the differences in attitudes between women and men national and European parliamentarians across 15 democracies in Western Europe. I consider the influence of the social policy environment of a parliamentarian’s nation, women’s autonomous access to resources in a parliamentarian’s nation, the mass orientations of a parliamentarian’s nation, the party family to which the parliamentarian belongs, the ideology of the parliamentarian, the institutional design elements of the parliamentarian’s nation, and the gender composition of the representational body in which the parliamentarian resides.