Women’s access to the political sphere in Italy: when obstacles outdo opportunities
Marinella Belluati (Università degli Studi di Torino) Daniela R. Piccio (Università degli Studi di Torino)
Rossana Sampugnaro (Università di Catania)
Italy remained for decades one of the countries in Europe with the lowest representation of women in the national parliament. From the first parliamentary elections of the Italian Republic in 1948, to 2005, the average percentage of women MPs stood at 6.73. From the 2006 elections onwards, an increasing trend in the number of women representatives can be observed. Figures improved moderately in 2006 and 2008, rising to 15.94% and 19.63% respectively and then rose abruptly in 2013, with 206 women MPs elected, corresponding to 30.11%. A record number of female MPs were elected in the current legislature (2018-), which counts 334 women representatives, 35.8 percent of the total number of MPs. In only a decade, Italy managed to exceed the average for European Union parliaments (at 29.3% of women MPs1) and to exceed the critical 30% threshold for
female political representation regarded by international standards as the minimum desirable share of decision-making positions to be held by women2. The substantial progress in improving women’s
political representation at national level does not stand in isolation, corresponding, rather, to an increase in women’s political representation in local and regional Councils as well as in the European Parliament3.
The introduction of legislative quotas at the local (2012), the European (2004 and reformed in 2014) and the national levels (2017) played a significant role in this respect. Their introduction is the outcome of a long journey and of a long-standing commitment to the promotion of female political representation by women’s groups inside and outside the institutions. Quotas were first introduced in the early 1990s for regional and national-level elections, then declared as unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in 1995. They were finally approved after Parliament introduced a constitutional law amending article 51 of the Constitution in 20034. Its new wording provides that
‘any citizen of either sex is eligible for public offices and elected positions on equal terms, according to the conditions established by law. To this end, the Republic shall adopt specific measures to promote equal opportunities between women and men’5. This constitutional amendment paved the
way to the adoption of legal quotas and provided further legitimation of the introduction of voluntary quotas by the various political parties.
Overall, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality, Italy is ‘progressing towards gender equality at a much faster pace than other EU Member States’ (EIGE, 2019). Is the reality for women in Italian politics as rosy as it appears from these growing figures? The answer is negative. If opportunities for women’s political participation have increased, the obstacles are still numerous and they outnumber the opportunities (Guadagnini, 2005).
This is certainly not an Italian problem only. Figures from the 2020 Global Gender Gap Report show this clearly. Despite the increase in the average global score for women’s empowerment, it will take an estimated 257 years for the gender gap to close at the current speed (World Economic Forum, 2020: 6)6. Among the 153 countries examined by the Global Report, Italy
1European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), Gender Statistics Database (2016-2018). 2 United Nations Economic and Social Council Resolution 1990/15.
3 See EIGE (2019) Gender equality in national parliaments across the EU and the European Parliament Gender mainstreaming 2019 results.
4 Constitutional Law 30 May 2003, n. 1, Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 134, 12 June 2003.
5 Constitution of the Italian Republic, Senato della Repubblica (official translation), italics added.
6 Women’s empowerment is observed with reference to four key dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
is in the middle of the ranking, in 76th place. Considering Western Europe and North America, it
ranks 19th out of 22 countries, with only Greece, Malta and Cyprus ranking lower.
Notably, according to the 2020 Report, the problem with Italy does not seem to lie so much in the numerical representation of women, whose score has significantly improved since the first Report was issued in 20067. The problem lies instead on other dimensions, which are mostly affected
by the country’s value systems, cultural norms and traditions, and which are not protected by electoral quotas, such as women’s participation in the labour market and salary disparities. This is precisely the core puzzle that we address in this contribution and in this special issue. Italy has been experiencing a significant increase in the number of women represented in elected offices and yet such increase has not led to significant changes in terms of substantive equality.
One revealing anecdote will be worth mentioning. In mid-April 2020, the Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Family, Ms. Angela Bonetti, set up a task force called ‘Donne per un nuovo Rinascimento’ (‘Women for a New Renaissance’) composed of 12 female experts tasked with ‘elaborating ideas and proposals for social, cultural and economic recovery following the Covid-19 emergency’8. This Committee has no decision-making power nor is it in any way a relevant actor in
the management of the ongoing emergency or in the elaboration of possible post-lockdown scenarios. In the same weeks, the Italian government established an all-male (20/20) technical scientific committee charged with the task of providing scientific and strategic policy advice to the Government during the virus’ outbreak9. This recent event seems to reveal the essence of political
power in Italy, in the absence of quotas: highly feminized yet politically irrelevant arenas, and all-male decision-making. As we shall discuss later at greater length, women occupy the ‘periphery of politics’ (Farina and Carbone, 2016), the centre still being tightly controlled by men.
This special issue focuses on the tension between the formal rules aimed at reducing the disparity between the genders in public office and the informal barriers to women’s political participation. These also include the way in which media systems portray women, taking into consideration their role either in promoting equal opportunities for women or, on the contrary, in contributing to the diffusion gender stereotypes. We collected original contributions by authors willing to reflect on the main obstacles to women’s access to the public sphere in Italy. Using these articles as guidelines for a discussion, we grouped the main obstacles for women wishing to take part in political life into five main thematic areas.
The first thematic area we tackle is the one related to the adoption of gender equality policies. Conventionally considered as important and useful instruments for gendering political institutions, measures such as legislative quotas or gendered electoral financing have not always produced the expected outcomes (Murray, 2012). Their effectiveness has often been hampered by a plurality of factors. Comparative research on feminist policy processes has shown that the best policy outcomes are achieved when a large plurality of actors within but also beyond the institutional domain are involved at all stages of the policy process and when they are able to provide continuous feedback. In turn, this requires that institutions are open to feminist claims. As we will also see later when we talk about political parties, this is anything but an obvious premise. Moreover, when feminist issues are involved, symbolic policy-making is lying in wait. That is, according to Edelman’s definition, policy decisions which are never intended to be fully implemented (Edelman,1964) and that are adopted by policy makers for ‘image-making [rather] than problem-solving’ (Mazur, 1995: 2). The first two research articles focus on two specific policy instruments that were introduced in Italy to increase women’s political representation (gender-targeted public funding of political parties and electoral
7 Italy’s Political Empowerment score was 0.08 in 2006 and it currently stands at 0.26, increasing by 0.18 points on a 0.0-1.0 scale (Global Gender Report, 2020).
8 Department of Equal Opportunities, Presidency of the Council of Ministers, 10 April 2020.
9 A successful campaign called ‘Dateci voce’ (‘Give us voice’) emerged in response to the Government’s failed attention to the inclusion of women, demanding fair representation and shared responsibility in management of the post-emergency situation. In response to this mobilization, the Government appointed 11 women.
quotas), pointing to major weaknesses in their design. The contribution of Francesca Feo and Daniela Piccio explores the conditions that led to the introduction of the first gendered party funding measure in 1999. This measure – requiring parties eligible to receive electoral reimbursement to spend at least 5% of the amount received on the adoption of ‘initiatives to promote women’s active participation in politics’ – was anything but successful. Poor policy design, vague wording and the absence of sanctions were the main reasons for its failure. The authors analyse the institutional and historical context in which the measure was introduced; the actors involved in the policy processes, and its main development. The contribution by Guido Legnante and Marta Regalia also takes up the issue of unsuccessful gender equality policies, but focuses on legislative quotas for the European Parliament elections. The authors discuss the multiple hurdles facing female candidates, despite the presence of gender quotas, observing three fundamental stages of the political recruitment process (candidacy, election and seat allocation) by means of a close analysis of the European Parliament elections of 2018. Equal gender representation was not achieved because of parties placing men at the top of party lists, because of voters preferring male over women candidates and, perhaps even more paradoxically, because of the design of the law in itself, whose loopholes allowed for parties to circumvent the spirit of the regulations.
Overall, pointing to major flaws in the two regulations’ design, both articles shed light on the fact that legislators themselves are among the obstacles to feminist policy development. Whether this is an intentional move by a male-dominated status quo seeking to maintain itself, or the result of inaccurate policy-making, does not really matter, the result still being ineffective policies as far as feminist goals are concerned.
Policies for balancing women’s representation encounter two other crucial constraints: on the one hand, the mechanisms for the selection of candidates by political parties and, on the other, the disposition towards female candidates of voters. The contribution by Sampugnaro and Montemagno deals with the former. In their fundamental and unique function as gatekeepers of the political process, parties offer important arenas for the promotion of women’s political participation and for their advancement through all the main stages of the political process. To various degrees, parties with different political traditions have been increasingly opening up towards women and feminist claims (Childs and Webb, 2011; Celis and Childs, 2014) advancing the tradition of women’s political representation well beyond the political parties of the left, the traditional allies as far as women’s interests are concerned. Yet, obstacles remain. Sampugnaro and Montemagno enter the ‘secret garden of politics’ (Gallagher and Marsh, 1988) exploring the individual parties’ regulatory frameworks as well as the informal rules and practices on women’s candidacy at the 2018 General Elections. The empirical analysis focuses on the sociology of female candidates (demographics, political trajectory, incumbency) and on the way in which individual parties provide women with actual opportunities to advance beyond this first critical stage of the political recruitment process. The law has had the merit of introducing to the political circuit a large number of women, on average younger than the outgoing ones but with little previous political experience. The comparison of men’s and women’s political profiles confirms the presence of different structures of opportunity in the same party by gender, and that men’s opportunities for office interact with women’s opportunities. Furthermore, there are profound differences across parties that mitigate the idea of ‘institutionally sexist organizations’ (Lovenduski, 2005: 48). This is not so much because of the presence of party leaders such as Giorgia Meloni or Emma Bonino, but rather because the match between written rules (generally sensitive to the rebalancing of representation) and practices in the selection and positioning of candidates is not coherent. Indeed, only in the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-star Movement, M5s) can this matching be observed with the consequence of more gender balanced parliamentary groups.
Another perspective explaining the lack of women in legislative chambers is provided by electoral behaviour: expected and actual. In the first case, the vote is considered primarily as an expected voter preference for male candidates: considering a strategy of maximisation of votes,
parties could limit the number of female candidates or give them constituencies already considered as lost. In the same vein, voters’ stereotypes can provide more opportunities for female politicians. As Sanbonmatsu says, women can seem ‘more honest than men’ (an additional stereotype!) and can reassure voters in the face of political corruption (2010: 39). In the second case, the focus is on the existence of voters’ bias towards women: the very controversial results of this approach underline the importance of the cultural context, the candidates’ previous experience and the electoral system. In this field of study, the contribution of Pansardi and Pinto looks at the under-representation of women candidates as an electoral outcome. The article deals with the ‘gender penalty’ hypothesis, understood as voters’ prejudice against women candidates. Focusing on voters’ behaviour in single-member districts, the research tests the relative performances of male and female candidates on three related dimensions: their chances of being elected; their attractiveness, and their electoral vulnerability. The analysis confirms the presence of voters’ biases in producing unfavourable attitudes toward women, meaning that they have to fight in very competitive elections to win seats.
Local culture is a fourth area of investigation. As argued above, women are more likely to be found at the periphery of power. Indeed, previous studies have shown that women have greater opportunities to access the public sphere at the local level, where the stakes are low. The local level also allows women willing to enter politics to reconcile work and family life. In Italy this research is not sufficiently developed. However, a study by Alisia Del Re (1999, 2004) confirms that this is true particularly at the lower level of politics, and that on the contrary women face considerable difficulties in reaching the highest positions, for example as president or mayor. Despite women reaching high positions at local level, it is more difficult to reproduce this condition at the national level (Del Re, 2004). Overall, local politics seem to be ‘tailored’ to women (Sebastiani, 2011) because of their commitment to small-scale and local associations where they can immediately check the results of their activities (Elder and Greene, 2003).
However, in Italy there is another territorial perspective relevant to issues of gender. The article by Carbone and Farina analyses women’s political representation from the perspective of the local political culture. Italy is a country where the local culture still strongly influences socialization in terms of gender roles, in politics and in the society more broadly. The Italian local culture becomes a structural cage for female opportunities in politics. In some areas, political participation appears as more ideological and access to polical offices more closely linked to the so-called ‘vote of belonging’; in other areas the political offer is more characterized by vote buying where particularistic benefits are in exchange for vote choices (Parisi and Pasquino, 1977). This results in higher closure also in terms of gender too.
Finally, we turn to media practices and the way they have been increasing or decreasing the gender gap. The importance of public representations of female politicians in influencing socio-cultural and political norms has been widely acknowledged in the literature (Duverger, 1955; Ross and Carter, 2011; Campus, 2013; Franks, 2013; Ross, 2017; Krijnen and Van Bauwel, 2015). Like politics, the media have always been a patriarchal domain. This also applies to the case of Italy. As shown by recent (2018) research by the European Journalism Observatory, for example, men still write most news, business and opinion content, Italy being the country where the percentage of articles bylined by men is the highest (63%)10. Men also typically hold the leading positions in the media. Mid-May
(shortly after the under-representation of women in the Covid-19 task force came to light), the Italian public broadcasting service (RAI) appointed the directors of the main channels, once again failing to select any women. Additionally, the report on Italy of the Global Media Monitoring Project (2015) has confirmed the persistence of a highly stereotyped portrayal of women in the Italian media (especially mainstream ones). On the one hand, this shows a society that is still unable fully to
10 The countries included in the sample were the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom (see EJO, Where are the women journalists in Europe’s media?, 2018).
integrate women, especially in the public domain. On the other hand, the fact that few non-stereotypical women are represented in the media helps to reinforce a cultural attitude that avoids promoting a balanced knowledge and understanding of gender issues. Still, the collective imaginary promoted by the Italian media relegates women to very specific roles: women as sexual objects, as mothers and housewives. The result is the reproduction of roles and stereotypes that women themselves end up accepting and that they perceive they cannot exit even when they do have the competence and cultural resources.
The article by Marinella Belluati examines how women in politics use communication tools to improve their public visibility. According to her analysis, not only are women in politics misrepresented, but they also have difficulties in using the available tools. While in the past it was believed that the domain of online communication would help to empower women (Harcourt, 1999), it is now clear that the internet is dominated by a masculine logic. This contributes to fostering a negative representation spiral of the female political world in the public space.
Overall, despite the introduction of legislative quotas and an equality promotion rhetoric that recognizes the importance of women’s active participation in politics, the barriers that women face in seeking access to what is still a male-dominated public world remain significant. First, if the number of women representatives in elected office has indeed increased over the past fifteen years, this pattern is still far from homogeneous, some cultural and social contexts being much more favourable to women than others. Especially relevant in this respect are the economic and educational levels of women as well as their media consumption (Istat, 2019). Second, female political leadership has remained exceptional. All the main party secretaries in the history of the Italian Republic have been male (with the exception of the current leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI), Giorgia Meloni), as well as all Prime Ministers and Presidents of the Republic. This is also apparent in those political contexts that are supposed to be more open to women’s issues because of long-standing traditions of incorporating women’s movements’ claims and demands. For example, the Women’s assembly of the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) no longer holds regular meetings; the party continues to provide the minimum funding for women’s political activities as prescribed by law, and continues to prefer male to female candidates. Third, as various contributions to this special issue show, many of the gender representation policies that have been introduced present various loopholes in their design, the most blatant example being the provision for multiple candidacies, which nullifies the effect of the ‘zipped’ (male/female candidates) system under the new (2017) electoral law. The design weaknesses of many of those policies lead to a typical situation observed by feminist scholars in which ‘parties (formally) comply with the letter of gender representation laws while (informally) violating their spirit’ (Kenny and Verge, 2016: 363). Indeed, parties duly fill the spaces for female candidates in the percentages prescribed by the law – only to assign to male candidates the seats left vacant by the elected women. This also leads to a sense of frustration on the part of women who are discouraged from taking part in a game whose rules are set by others. We can imagine this process as a vicious circle. Women’s self-exclusion from politics in turn legitimizes men not to take women as politicians seriously, further fuelling the concept of women’s inadequacy. All this confirms that the presence of regulatory instruments does matter, but that it does not solve gender gap in Italian politics. Article 3 of the Italian Constitution states that ‘it is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of citizens […]’. Referring to this article, Alisia Del Re suggests that the Constitution ‘forgets that the obstacles that women have to face are also cultural and symbolic’ (Del Re, 1999: 32). Without such cultural and symbolic change, any measure aimed at balancing gender representation in political offices is unlikely to produce substantial equality. In this framework, the debate on gender quotas threatens to become a smokescreen that hides the need for cultural change.
The Covid-19 management mentioned at the beginning of this introduction has shown this very clearly. In situations of crisis and emergency, the actual structures of power reveal their effects in perpetuating inequality. Representation of women in politics was offered by means of quotas and
other equality policy measures, but this offer was withdrawn at the moment of greatest emergency. Power devolved is power retained.
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