private_members_bills_australia_commonwealth_1997_2022.csv

Female legislators are typically assumed to act for other women when policymaking. While the extant literature supports this, a need to ‘tow the party line’ has complicated the process of attributing acts of substantive representation vis-à-vis policy to any individual political actor. Using 1047 private member’s bills tabled in the Australian Commonwealth during the 1995-2022 period, we address this limitation by employing a quantitative text analysis approach. We show that women do substantively represent women on a wide range of issues, pursuing more feminist legislation than their male counterparts. This suggests that gender remains relevant for understanding substantive political representation.