The Political Representation of Women in Politics

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Politics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, course: Representatives in Historical Perspective: From the King's two Bodies to Celebrity Stars, language: English, abstract: This paper discusses the representation of women in politics and aims to identify the consequences of their presence in politics, more concrete in democracies. Therefore the author will analyse several forms of representation. This work will discuss primarily the descriptive and symbolic representation of women as ¿standing for something¿ and resembling half of the world population. How does the representation of woman in politics affect women in the real world? And what is the value and what are the costs of descriptive and symbolic representation of women? Moreover the connection to substantive representation is explained briefly. For this work the author will use the concepts as developed by Hanna Pitkin in her book ¿The concept of Representation¿. These will be explained now in the first Chapter before the analyses.