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Methodological Reflections on Studying Gender‐Sensitive Parliaments Cross‐Nationally: A “Most Significant Change” Approach
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Abstract: Whilst cross-national comparative analyses provide distinct opportunities for the study of gender-sensitive parliaments, the inherent challenge in conducting comparisons necessitates a continued search for innovative methods. This article responds to this need by proposing the “most significant change” (MSC) approach (Davies & Dart, 2005), which centres on collecting and analysing “stories of significant change.” Drawing on our own application of MSC in an international study commissioned by INTER PARES, we show that MSC’s bottom-up, inductive, and participatory approach proved valuable in uncovering hitherto unknown instances of gender-sensitive changes across countries, illuminating the broader impact of such changes beyond parliaments and incorporating practitioners’ perspectives. The flexibility of MSC also enabled context-specific applications, which we illustrate through three examples from Cyprus, Germany, and Trinidad & Tobago. By offering a complementary approach to compare parliaments’ gender sensitivity across countries, our study provides a novel perspective for future comparative analyses in the field.
Keywords: comparative politics; gender equality; gender‐sensitive parliaments; parliaments; research methods
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© Petra Ahrens, Silvia Erzeel, Merel Fieremans. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.