Replication Data for: Whose bread I eat, their song I sing? How the gender of MPs influences the use of oversight mechanisms in government and opposition

This article is the first to show that gender shapes the degree to which legislators use formal mechanisms to oversee government activities. Extensive scholarly work has analysed the use of oversight instruments, especially regarding who monitors whom. Whether, how, and why the conformity of men and women with institutional roles differs, has not yet received scholarly attention. We hypothesise that women become more active than men in overseeing the executive when in opposition while reducing their monitoring activities even more strongly than men when in government because of different social roles ascribed to men and women as well as differences in risk aversity between sexes. We analyse panel data for three oversight tools from the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2013 to test this proposition. Our findings imply that characteristics of political actors influence even a strongly institutionalised process as oversight and further clarify the gender bias in political representation.本文首次揭示，性别会影响议员运用正式机制监督政府活动的程度。学界已开展大量研究，对监督工具的使用情况展开分析，尤其聚焦于“谁监督谁”这一核心议题。而关于男性与女性在遵循制度角色方面存在差异的具体表现、内在逻辑与成因，目前尚未有学术研究给予关注。基于男女社会角色定位的差异以及两性风险规避倾向的不同，我们提出如下研究假说：在野期间，女性议员对行政部门的监督活跃度将高于男性；而当身处执政党阵营时，女性议员的监督行为缩减幅度则会显著大于男性。我们采用1949年至2013年间德国联邦议院（German Bundestag）的三类监督工具面板数据，对该研究假说进行实证检验。本研究结果表明，政治行为体的个体特征甚至会对高度制度化的监督流程产生影响，同时进一步厘清了政治代表领域存在的性别偏见问题。