The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary

The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name.

Across Eastern Europe, despite radical changes to the political environment – including the postwar period, the revolutions of 1989, the post-Communist era and the rise in power of the European Union in the early 21st Century – in comparison with men, women always have had far fewer representatives in national legislatures. How can this be? In this article I compare Romania and Poland from the postwar period to now to critically examine the causes and dynamics of women’s unequal political representation. While gender inequality in various forms has been a constant feature, the characteristics of its relationship to political inequality – its form, duration and magnitude – changed over successive eras. I argue that much more research needs to be done to properly understand dynamics of, and links between, the history and the present of women’s political inequality in Eastern Europe; as such I also criticize the extant literature and suggest directions for future social science inquiry.

Keywords: political inequality, women’s political representation, gender, Eastern Europe