Gender Politics and Legislative Networks in Taiwan: An Analysis of Women-Bill Co-Sponsorship and Bill Success

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how legislative networks can be utilised to further the interests of female voters. Specifically, I investigate how legislators’ gender and partisanship within co-sponsorship networks are related to the successful passage of women bills. For this goal, the article focusses on Taiwan—where both women’s descriptive and substantive representations have improved dramatically since democratisation and, at the same time, co-sponsoring bills have been a legislative process of the ongoing significance. The article utilises an original bill co-sponsorship dataset that consists of 232,734 co-sponsors related to all bills submitted between 2005 and 2016. By comparing women and non-women bills, the article demonstrates that the legislative effectiveness on women bills varied by legislator’s gender and affiliated party. That is, the proportion of male legislators in the co-sponsorship network did not effect on women bill success, while it turned out to be positively related to non-women bill success. Moreover, the proportion of right-leaning party legislators in the co-sponsorship network decreased the odds of women bill passage while increasing the chance of non-women bill ones. Despite the increasing participation of male legislators and right-leaning party legislators in co-sponsoring women’s issues in Taiwan, the results demonstrate that their role was limited on the success of women bills.