Varför bör kvinnorepresentationen öka? En textstudie av den interna debatten inom tre politiska kvinnoförbund under sjuttiotalet

When it comes to political representation, all over the world women almost always make up a minority of representatives in the legislative bodies. The Scandinavian countries in general and Sweden in particular have though been exceptions to this rule with, when compared to other countries, a rather high percentage of women in elected positions. This development took off in the seventies: during that decade the unit percentage of women in the Swedish Riksdag rose by double! The aim for this thesis is to analyse what underlying ideas influenced this advance. The focus is on three different female party federations, who are believed to have had a great impact on this increase of women politicians through their influence in their own mother parties. The federations analysed are the ones connected to the Social Democratic Party, the Centre Party and the Liberal party. During this period, the Seventies, all of the federations had internal debates within their own magazines on the theme of ?more women in politics.? The specific question to be answered here is: ?Why were more women wanted in politics?? In order to answer this question and hopefully shed some light on the whole debate on representation, this paper breaks down the various approaches towards such issues of representation into three different schemas or models of analysis. These three schemas, found in the academic debate, for an increased female political representation, are: the ?interest argument,? the ?resource argument,? and the ?justice argument.? The result from the study is that none of the federations? approaches presented a solid picture of why more women were considered to be of importance. Different ideas were presented side by side although ?female interests? were considered slightly more important than the other arguments for an increased female political representation