
Cecilia JosefssonUppsala University | UU · Department of Government
Cecilia Josefsson
PhD
About
19
Publications
4,466
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Introduction
I am an Associate Professor (Docent) in the Department of Government at Uppsala University in Sweden. I received my PhD from the Department of Government at Uppsala University in November 2020. My research focuses on political institutions and representation from a gender perspective in a wide variety of contexts, including sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Scandinavia. My book, Defending the Status Quo: On Adaptive Resistance to Electoral Gender Quotas, was published in 2024 at OUP.
Additional affiliations
August 2011 - March 2016
Publications
Publications (19)
Defending the Status Quo explores political elites’ resistance to electoral gender quota reforms—one of the most widespread electoral reforms of recent decades—to increase understanding of the significant variation in this policy and its impact. The book conceptualizes resistance and develops an original theoretical framework for studying resistanc...
How do male-dominated populist radical right (PRR) parties relate to and influence norms around women’s political inclusion and leadership in mainstream political parties? While research has focused on describing the male dominance of PRR parties or its influence on mainstream political parties’ policies, particularly immigration, we know less abou...
Women’s access to political leadership positions has increased greatly in recent decades, which calls for research concerning the conditions of women’s political leadership in more gender-balanced contexts. This article responds to this need by exploring the leadership ideals, evaluations, and treatment of men and women leaders in the numerically g...
Do men and women representatives hold different legislative priorities? Do these priorities align with citizens who share their gender? Whereas substantive representation theorists suggest legislators’ priorities should align with their cogender constituents, Downsian-based theories suggest no role for gender. We test these differing expectations t...
Despite the popularity of electoral gender quotas, the substantive impact of quotas on the plenary behavior of members of parliament (MPs) has yet to be thoroughly empirically explored, and in particular, there is a dearth of evidence from non-Western cases. Here we create a unique content analysis dataset from 14 years (1998–2011) of plenary debat...
While women citizens have less political ambition than similarly
situated men across a wide range of contexts, we know less
about gender differences in progressive ambition – elected
politicians’ desire to achieve political leadership positions. This
study analyzes leadership ambition among Swedish legislators. To
understand the relationship betwee...
Women’s political representation has increased rapidly in the past few decades, but significant barriers continue to circumscribe women’s political participation in a myriad of ways. Previous research has indicated that online abuse constitutes one such obstacle. Yet, only a small number of studies have systematically examined and compared the expe...
Vi summerar resultaten av våra två senaste studier om ledarskap i riksdagen, genomförda 2020/2021
In this article, we introduce a Gendered Workplace Approach for studying the gendered nature of parliaments. This approach, which is informed by a feminist institutionalist perspective, addresses the potentially gendered character of both formal and informal institutions that regulate the inner workings of parliament, taking into consideration the...
Individuals who have a higher education are highly overrepresented in national legislative bodies worldwide. In spite of an extensive body of literature interested in educational background and its relation to political activity, significantly fewer studies have engaged with the qualitative advantages and drawbacks of legislators’ educational backg...
Women and young constitute two underrepresented groups in most legislatures worldwide. The aim of this paper is to theorize and empirically analyze how the hitherto overlooked intersection between gender and young age condition legislators’ opportunities to carry out their representative tasks on equal grounds. Using original survey data from the S...
Men’s over-representation persists in almost all legislatures. This article engages with this problem by bringing together literature on the gendered nature of political parties and literature on the gender gap in political ambition to argue that candidate selection procedures structure the meaning and importance of political ambition. Exploiting t...
Do men and women legislators have equal opportunities to carry out their parliamentary duties? An important first step to uncover the parliament’s inner life is to evaluate members of parliament’s (MPs) experiences of their work environment. In this article, we explore the Swedish parliament where women have held over 40% of the seats for two decad...
It is well documented that new groups risk be marginalized after they gain representation in the legislature. In this paper, we explore the Swedish case where women have held over 40 percent of the seats in the Parliament for over two decades to test the persistence of gendered norms and practices that enable continued male dominance and constrain...
This report is based on a unique survey conducted in the Swedish parliament 2016 where we investigate if all legislators have the same opportunities to perform their parliamentary duty.
Unfortunately the report is not translated to English yet.
Many parliaments now include specialised bodies to further women's interests in the legislative process. In this article, we compare cross-party women's caucuses in two non-Western countries—Uganda and Uruguay—which, despite very different levels of women's descriptive representation, spurred public debate on women's issues and made significant leg...
Do local governments learn from their successful peers when designing public policies? In spite of extensive research on policy diffusion and learning, there is still a lack of studies on how success relates to learning patterns. We address this deficiency by examining which other governments local administrative units draw lessons from. More preci...
This article charts a new direction in gender quota research by examining whether female legislators in general, and quota recipients in particular, are accorded respect and authority in plenary debates. We measure this recognition in relation to the number of times an individual member of parliament (MP) is referred to by name in plenary debates....
Employing a before-and-after comparison, this article exploits a reform of the Ugandan quota law to test if a change in election procedures affects the types of women elected through quotas. In Uganda, a change from indirect to direct elections was anticipated to bring in women who were more representative of female citizens at large and less loyal...