Gender Politics and Legislative Networks in Taiwan: An Analysis of Women-Bill Co-Sponsorship and Bill Success

This article examines how legislative networks can be utilised to further the interests of female voters. Specifically, I investigate how legislators' gender and partisanship within co-sponsorship networks are related to the successful passage of women bills. For this goal, the article focusses on Taiwan - where both women's descriptive and substantive representations have improved dramatically since democratisation and, at the same time, co-sponsoring bills have been a legislative process of the ongoing significance. The article utilises an original bill co-sponsorship dataset that consists of 232,734 co-sponsors related to all bills submitted between 2005 and 2016. By comparing women and non-women bills, the article demonstrates that the legislative effectiveness on women bills varied by legislator's gender and affiliated party. That is, the proportion of male legislators in the co-sponsorship network did not effect on women bill success, while it turned out to be positively related to non-women bill success. Moreover, the proportion of right-leaning party legislators in the co-sponsorship network decreased the odds of women bill passage while increasing the chance of non-women bill ones. Despite the increasing participation of male legislators and right-leaning party legislators in co-sponsoring women's issues in Taiwan, the results demonstrate that their role was limited on the success of women bills.