PROSPECTS FOR WOMEN’S LEGISLATIVE REPRESENTATION IN POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE The Views of Female Politicians YVONNE GALLIGAN SARA CLAVERO Queen’s University Belfast Research on women’s political representation in postsocialist Europe has highlighted the role of cultural and political factors in obstructing women’s access to legislative power, such as the prevalence of traditional gender stereotypes, electoral systems, and the absence of a feminist movement. Yet, the role of women political elites in enhancing or hindering women’s access to political power in the region has so far remained uncharted. This article seeks to fill some of the existing gaps in this literature by examining the views of women politicians with regard to women’s political underrepresentation and their assessments of strategies for redressing this imbalance. Findings from the analysis reveal that although women politicians recognize gender inequalities in representation as a problem requiring intervention, how the problem is perceived, and the preferred measures to deal with it, is largely shaped by the social and cultural context in which these actors are embedded. Keywords: women and politics; culture; political elites; legislative recruitment; political representation; postsocialist Europe S ince the demise of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, there has been a growing body of research on gender and politics in post- socialist countries. Much of this scholarship draws particular attention to AUTHORS’ NOTE: This article draws on interview data collected as part of a project funded by the European Union under the Fifth Framework Programme: “Enlargement, Gender and Governance: The Civic and Political Participation and Representation of Women in EU Candidate Countries” (HPSE-CT2002-00115). The authors would like to thank the researchers who conducted the interviews in the seven countries examined in this article, Alexandra Bitusikova (Slovakia), Eva Bahovec (Slovenia), Eva Eberhardt (Hungary), Malgorzata Fuszara (Poland), Georgeta Ghebrea (Romania), Hana Haskova (Czech Republic), and Nedyalka Videva (Bulgaria), and their respective teams. The authors would also like to extend their thanks to the editors of Gender & Society and to five anony- mous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 22 No. 2,April 2008 149-171 DOI: 10.1177/0891243207312268 © 2008 Sociologists for Women in Society 149