Gender and Environmental Legislation : A study on gender’s effect on legislative behaviour in the Swedish parliament

Abstract: This paper looks at the motions sent into the Swedish government’s Committee on Environment and Agriculture between 2018-2022 to see if gender impacts the environmental content. Much research has been done on the environmental attitudes of representatives; however, little research has been done on environmental legislative behaviour. When it’s been done, there have been varying results Some find that women engage in more pro-environmental legislative behaviour than men, and some find that there is no difference (e.g. Fredriksson & Wang, 2011; Jones, 1997). The hypothesis for this study was that women would show more pro-environmental behaviour in their motions. However, the result from this study shows that there was no significant difference in number of environmental motions sent in by women and men. Nevertheless, the results showed that there is a significant connection between parties and pro- environmental motions, where the more right a party was on the left-right scale, the less pro-environmental motions were sent in. In addition, the results show that right wing parties handed in more anti-environmental motions. These findings could strengthen the research on environmental attitudes and environmental behaviour amongst legislators.