Evidence from Italy and Spain

This paper tries to assess the effect of some institutional and political variables (district and party magnitude) on women’s legislative recruitment vis-à-vis social factors (operationalized as female activity rate) in two polities, Italy and Spain, which elect (or elected) their MPs by a PR electoral system. The primary aim of this paper is to put forward a test for the effect of district and party magnitude, and for the life cycle theory of party magnitude (Matland 1993) within each of the two countries under scrutiny over a relatively large number of elections held between 1976 and 2008. The paper argues that the hypothesis of a life cycle of district and party magnitude put forward by Matland (1992, 1993) is confirmed in both cases. After adding new evidence supporting district and party magnitude theory, in the final part of the paper the findings of each case are briefly paralleled and contrasted in order to better assess the impact of the above mentioned independent variables on women’s recruitment, and to put forward some refinement to the existing hypotheses. Key words: women; parliamentary recruitment; electoral systems; district magnitude; party magnitude. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Cortona Colloquium 2008 – Gender an