Framing Crisis

Abstract: Many questions about the relationships between debate, policy, and substantive representation are still unanswered. Two such examples are, the role of gender, but also - how crises affect representation. This study addresses this gap by examining who (related to gender) speaks about sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and in what way, during an especially critical time (the COVID-19 pandemic). Women’s SRH issues have often gone unrecognized during crises because it is not a direct effect of a virus, but an indirect consequence of structural inequalities. It is therefore interesting to analyze men and women MPs’ legislative behavior and policy priorities during COVID-19. For this study, a dataset is created where individual-level MP speech data serve as the indicator for substantive representation. The methodological contribution made in this paper, using a mixed-method approach, highlights some of the problems associated with studying substantive representation using only quantitative methods. While the quantitative content analysis finds support for the fact that women MPs speak more about SRH than men, the frame analysis highlights that mentioning keywords does not necessarily entail substantive representation. Women MPs generelly frame SRH issues as a structural problem of inequality, while male MPs frame it as an urgent problem caused by the pandemic, or in some cases, as not a problem at all. Studying the case of Uganda is especially interesting because it can provide additional knowledge about representation in an African parliament, and in a semi-authoritarian country.