Emelie Lilliefeldt, "Party and gender in Western Europe revisited: A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of gender-balanced parliamentary parties," Party Politics, 18 (March, 2012), 193-214. [Available at http://ppq.sagepub.com/content/vol18/issue2/ ]

First paragraph:
The topic of this study is political parties and women's parliamentary presence. Understanding the mechanisms that produce gender-balanced parliaments in modern party democracies rests on two levels of analysis: individual parties and the party environment. In addition, the idea that some conditions may be fruitfully framed as necessary or sufficient1 for gender-balanced parliamentary representation has received considerable attention. Several scholars have argued persuasively that intra-party factors combine with party-external conditions in inducing gender balance in national parliaments (Caul Kittilson, 2006: 37, 121; Norris, 2004: 187-8, 208; 2006: 204).

Figures and Tables:

Table 1. Sufficient conditions for gender balance: Intermediate solution

Table 2. Sufficient conditions for non-balance: Intermediate solution

Last Paragraph:
In sum, this article shows that individual political parties played a central role in the surge of women's parliamentary presence in Western European parliaments during the late 1980s. Ideally, the next step in this research process should be investigation of the extent to which the results presented here can be generalized outside Western Europe. Future studies may show how well the above applies to contemporary political parties, where other institutional settings, for example, gender quotas, have become more common. Including a temporal dimension could also contribute to a picture where women in party leadership and women's movements are taken into account.