Substantive Representation of Women in Asian Parliaments. Edited by Devin K. Joshi and Christian Echle. London: Routledge, 2022. 294 pp. $128.00 (cloth), $44.95 (paper). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003275961.

Abstract

As a discipline, we know very little about the experience of women in parliaments across Asia, even though the region is home to “three-fifths of the world’s population” (1) and the world’s first female prime minister (Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Sri Lanka, 1960). In part, thismay be because—in the aggregate—women’s political presence in this region has tended to sit “in the middle” of global rankings: not high enough to warrant “best practice” accounts, yet not low enough to become a focal point of development concern. Our limited collective understanding, however, may also reflect the Euro-American focus of our discipline, which has historically set the standard of what counts as “good research.” Academics who sit and write outside these theoretical frameworks and interpretative lens have been rendered less visible. Devin K. Joshi and Christian Echle’s edited collection, Substantive Representation of Women in Asian Parliaments, therefore represents a significant contribution to our understanding of women’s experiences across 10 very diverse parliaments: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (in East Asia); Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste (in Southeast Asia); and Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (in South Asia). Mikiko Eto and Ummu Atiyah Ahmad Zakuan, writing on Japan andMalaysia, respectively, explicitly refer to their studies as the “first” on the substantive representation of women (SRW) in those countries (28, 121), although this would also be the case for a number of other chapters. The collection begins with Joshi’s description of the Asian context, defined in terms of its widespread “patriarchal bureaucratization of power,” which has accounted for “women’s formal exclusion from political institutions,” and the high number of states that can still be classified as “non-democracies, semidemocracies, and newly emerging democracies” (6). Each chapter then follows a similar structure, beginning with a discussion of political and cultural contexts, including legislative and policy efforts to advance gender equality more broadly, followed by descriptions of the individuals surveyed for the study. These are