Needles in a haystack: an intersectional analysis of the descriptive, constitutive and substantive representation of minoritised women

Abstract

Using a data set of 1.1 million speeches drawn from UK House of Commons debates during 1997–2017 and a combination of automated and manual content analysis, this study addresses three interrelated questions. First, to what extent are minoritised women constitutively represented in parliamentary debates? Second, which MPs do so? Third, how do MPs’ race and gender affect how they represent minoritised women? I find that minoritised women are mentioned exceptionally rarely in parliamentary debates. Furthermore, descriptive representatives are not only substantially more likely to mention minoritised women than other MPs, but they also improve the quality of representation by doing so in relation to a wider range of issues. Yet, paradoxically, white men’s descriptive over-representation means that they account for the vast majority of mentions of minoritised women. More broadly, I foreground the distinction between constitutive and substantive representation, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between speaking about and on behalf of.