The promotion of women’s political representation and gender-sensitive policy has become an almost universal goal in international organizations (IOs). We focus on national parliaments, the core institution of representative democracy, and ask whether bringing Members of Parliament into international forums enhances gender-sensitive policymaking at home. Our argument is that international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) enable transnational learning: women MPs exchange practical know-how, absorb norms, and build networks that they can translate into domestic reform. We test this claim in the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the most globally encompassing IPI. Using a mixed-methods design, we pair field observations and interviews from four recent IPU Assemblies with an original cross-national dataset on the gender composition of 178 national delegations across 25 assemblies (2010–2023). The results show a positive association between sending a higher share of women MPs to IPU meetings and subsequent gains on indices of Women’s Political Empowerment. The effect is conditional: it is strongest in lower-capacity parliaments and in hybrid regimes, and weaker in consolidated democracies and autocracies. Qualitative evidence illustrates how policy workshops, peer exchange, and mentoring provide concrete templates for reform. Taken together, the evidence indicates that parliamentary IOs can help convert representation by presence (descriptive representation) into tangible advances for women at home (substantive representation), especially where institutional resources are limited and political opportunities exist.
Maddah et al. (Sat,) studied this question.
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