Browsing by Subject "descriptive and substantive representation"

Tiivistelmä – Referat – Abstract This Master´s Thesis strives for increasing knowledge about women as minority in politics in general and, particularly, as minority in electoral politics when it comes to electoral candidates and their electoral promises. The aim is to contribute to solving the long-standing research problem of relationship between women´s descriptive and substantive representation in the field of political representation. Electoral candidates and their electoral promises in the context of Finnish Parliamentary Election in 2015 was chosen as research object because there is research gap concerning electoral promises from the perspective of women´s political representation in Finland. The theoretical framework emerges from the key theories, theoretical frameworks, and concepts in the fields of women in politics, feminist political theory, political representation, and women´s descriptive and substantive representation. Hanna Pitkin´s conceptual categories descriptive and substantive representation, and Anne Philip´s theory of politics of presence are the main theoretical approaches applied in the empirical analysis of the electoral promises. The data consists of 5244 electoral promises made by 2146 electoral candidates in the Voting advice application of YLE. To examine women´s descriptive representation, quantitative research method is applied. To examine women´s substantive representation, women´s interest are operationalized, and the electoral promises analysed from the perspective of women´s interests applying qualitative content analysis. To examine if there is relationship between women´s descriptive and substantive representation, women´s interests are operationalized, and the electoral promises are analysed in terms of women´s interest qualitatively applying content analysis. To answer the research problem, the promises including women´s interests are analysed quantitatively to find out to what extent the women candidates make promises that include women´s interests. Based on previous research on women´s political representation, the hypothesis of this study is that women´s descriptive and substantive representation are related which in this study means that women candidates are more willing to make electoral promises that include women´s interests than the men candidates. The main finding of the empirical analysis of this study is that there is relationship between women´s descriptive and substantive representation in terms of electoral promises that include women´s interests because the results show that the women candidates proportionally make significantly more promises that include women´s interests than the men candidates. The results also clearly show that the men candidates prefer making promises that include other than women´s interests, and as they make considerably more electoral promises than the women candidates owing to their descriptive overrepresentation, the women candidates´ possibilities to make difference in politics through their promises that include women´s interests are reduced. Overall, the main finding of this study support the hypothesis that there is relationship between women´s descriptive and substantive representation and that women candidates are the best representatives of women in terms of electoral promises. As this study is limited on women candidates and electoral promises, further research in the field of women´s political representation is needed to solve the problem of the relationship between women´s descriptive and substantive representation. Consequently, the research problem remains for future research to solve. This study contributes with empirical knowledge about women´s descriptive and substantive representation in general, and about the electoral candidates´ behaviour in the context of the Finnish Parliamentary Election from the perspective of gender and parties. Concerning research on voting advice applications, this study takes different perspective focusing on the content of the written electoral promises instead of examining the political implications of voting advice applications on the behaviour of voters.