Women in national legislatures: A cross-national analysis

The representation of women in national legislatures across the globe remains small. Theoretical accounts of the variation that does exist have not been fully tested. I test social structural, political, and ideological hypotheses with a large cross-national sample for two cross-sectional time periods-1975 and 1988. A panel study across the two periods allows tests of lagged effects. The results show that political and ideological variables are strongly significant and that women's position in the social structure, although often hypothesized as important, is not. (C) 1997 Academic Press.