The substantive representation of women - does issue-salience matter? Party politicization and UK Westminster elections 1945-2010

The following discussion responds to recent calls for a more holistic approach to studying the substantive representation of women (SRW). It uses mixed methods to explore the nexus between the SRW and issue salience in the manifesto discourse of UK state-wide elections 1945–2010. The data show that issue salience does matter to the SRW because it is part of on-going patterns and processes of party politicization linked to electoral cycles. The present findings also affirm that whilst there has been a trend of increasing issue salience over the post-war period, the SRW has also been subject to periods of set-back and reversal. Thus its status amongst competing policy priorities remains ‘fragile’; in turn, this raises issues of institutional sexism in the formative, agenda-setting phase of parties' public policy-making