Much Ado about Nothing? Political Representation Policies and the Influence of Women Parliamentarians in Germany

Up to the early 1980s, the percentage of women in the West German parliament remained under 10%—no more than in the very first election in which women were allowed to participate in 1918. The election of the Green Party to the Bundestag in 1983, with the aid of the party's 50% quota‐policy, increased this figure dramatically. Since this watershed election, the number of female parliamentarians has risen continuously: at the federal level reaching 32% in 2002 and at the state levels varying between 21% and 42%. In Germany, political representation policies are the exclusive domain of the political parties. This article, therefore, first analyses the aims and the performances of the main German political parties: the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Liberals, the Greens, and the Party of Democratic Socialism in the field of equal representation of women in politics, and it endeavors to shed light on their perceptions of women and gender equality. To determine whether women actually make a difference in elected office, the article next analyses the role of women parliamentarians in some of the major policies that affected the legal status of women and families in postwar Germany from 1949 to the 1990s. It concludes that women members of parliament (MPs), supported by other women's groups, have greatly influenced these policy‐making processes and, thus, the political culture in Germany.