"What is the feminisation of politics doing to public policy?" is the 2027 John Locke Public Policy question, reported from the Institute's October 2026 events. It asks whether more women in office, and a more female-leaning electorate, change what governments actually do. A strong essay defines "feminisation" before it measures anything, then uses studies where women's arrival in office is close to random. Below are three readings to start with and the main arguments to weigh.
The question at a glance
| Category | Public Policy |
| Wording | "What is the feminisation of politics doing to public policy?" |
| Status | Reported from the Institute's October 2026 events; the Institute's website will carry the official list |
| Word limit | 2,000 words, not counting endnotes and bibliography (2026 rules) |
| Who can enter | Any student under 19 on the submission deadline, from any country; under-15s are judged separately in the Junior category |
What the question is really asking
"Feminisation" has three meanings, and the essay has to pick. The first is descriptive: the share of seats, ministries and leadership posts held by women. Women held 24.3% of parliamentary seats worldwide in January 2019, up from 13.4% in 2000, according to the figures Hessami and Lopes da Fonseca cite from UN Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The second is electoral: women's votes, and a gender gap in values that has widened among young voters. The third is cultural. It claims politics has taken on a "feminine" style or set of values, such as consensus and care. That third sense is contested and often used as an insult. Helen Andrews's 2025 essay "The Great Feminization" uses it to argue that as women come to dominate institutions such as academic fields, those institutions become "oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth."
"Doing to" is causal and present-tense. The question wants effects, not a history of women's suffrage and not an argument about whether more women in politics would be fair. Fairness is a separate question. You can believe equal representation is right and still find that it changes little about spending, and you can find large effects and still think quotas are a bad tool.
The hidden assumption is that it is doing something. The textbook model of elections says it should not. If candidates compete for the median voter, the sex of the winner is irrelevant: everyone converges on the same platform. So the question invites a test: under what conditions does the identity of the person in office change policy? The economics literature has spent twenty years on exactly that, and the answer is "sometimes, and much more in some places than others."
The live controversy runs on two fronts. Academics argue about how large the effects are and why rich democracies show so few. Political commentators argue about whether feminisation is improving institutions or eroding them. The best essays connect the two and use the first to test the second.
The trap
The trap is the correlation essay. Studies have linked the share of women on Norwegian local councils to childcare coverage, and the share on Swedish councils to spending on childcare and education, so the essay concludes that women councillors produce childcare. But places that elect women may already want childcare; the voters, not the legislators, may be doing the work. The judges reward "the competent use of evidence," and here that means preferring studies where women's arrival in office is close to random: reserved seats assigned by lottery, or elections a woman won by a whisker. A close second is treating "women" as one bloc with one set of preferences, when the best Indian evidence shows women legislators splitting by class.
Three core readings
1. Chattopadhyay and Duflo, "Women as Policy Makers" (2004)
Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, "Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India," Econometrica 72, no. 5 (2004): 1409-1443. Open PDF.
India reserves one third of village council head posts for women, and the councils were selected at random. Chattopadhyay and Duflo surveyed 265 councils in Birbhum (West Bengal) and Udaipur (Rajasthan) and found that women heads "invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders." In practice that meant more drinking water in both states and more roads in West Bengal, where women had asked for roads. The paper also reports what got less: education in West Bengal and roads in Rajasthan. Use it as the causal anchor. The losers matter too: they show the effect is a reallocation of a fixed budget.
2. Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras, "Health and the Political Agency of Women" (2014)
Sonia Bhalotra and Irma Clots-Figueras, "Health and the Political Agency of Women," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6, no. 2 (2014): 164-97. Open working-paper version (CMPO 11/280, 2011).
This paper moves from village spending to state assemblies and from inputs to outcomes. Using elections that women won or lost by a narrow margin, it finds that "a one standard deviation increase in women's political representation results in a 1.5 percentage point reduction in neonatal mortality," which the authors put at 24% of the sample mean. Women politicians were more likely to build public health facilities and to encourage antenatal care, institutional delivery and immunisation. Use it to show the effect reaches outcomes people care about, and note how low the base was: women held an average of 3.6% of a district's seats.
3. Hessami and Lopes da Fonseca, "Female Political Representation and Substantive Effects on Policies" (2020)
Zohal Hessami and Mariana Lopes da Fonseca, "Female Political Representation and Substantive Effects on Policies: A Literature Review," IZA Discussion Paper 13125 (2020), published in European Journal of Political Economy 63 (2020), 101896. Open PDF.
This is the map of the whole field and the reading that keeps your essay honest. Its central finding: "In developed countries, higher female representation has not affected public policies as measured by spending patterns." It sets out the null results from US mayors, Spanish quotas, Norwegian councils and an Italian electoral reform, then the newer evidence that effects show up in detail rather than totals, such as faster childcare expansion in Bavaria. It also covers corruption and the quality of politicians. Use it for the "rich versus poor democracies" contrast, and follow its citations to the original studies you rely on.
Also worth reading: Helen Andrews, "The Great Feminization," Compact, 16 October 2025, the strongest recent statement of the cultural thesis; Grant Miller, "Women's Suffrage, Political Responsiveness, and Child Survival in American History," Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 3 (2008), on the electorate channel; and Joni Lovenduski, Feminizing Politics (Polity, 2005), which asks "are we really witnessing the feminization of politics?"
Arguments to think about
Each of these can carry a 2,000-word essay. Pick the one you can defend against its strongest objection, and make sure your essay answers that objection directly.
Reallocation, not expansion. Where women's arrival in office is close to random, the evidence shows a shift in the mix of spending rather than its size. India's reserved village seats moved spending toward drinking water (Chattopadhyay and Duflo), and women state legislators reduced neonatal mortality (Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras). The effects are largest where politics used to ignore women and small in rich democracies. Keep the three meanings apart: more women legislators, a more female-leaning electorate and a change in political style are different claims.
It is doing very little, and that is the finding. Take the rich-democracy null results seriously and argue that in the countries most entrants live in, the sex of legislators barely moves policy because parties and voters already carry women's preferences. The interesting question is then why the claim persists. This essay must explain away the Indian results as a feature of weak parties and poor services, not of women.
The real feminisation is in the electorate, not the legislature. Start from suffrage and the modern gender gap among young voters. Argue that what changes policy is women as voters, whom every party courts, rather than women as legislators. Miller's suffrage study and the Gallup data are the spine; the job is to show a causal link from voter gaps to specific policies, not just to vote shares.
The cultural claim is partly right. A defensible essay can argue that feminisation has changed political style, towards more consultation and more risk-aversion in areas such as safeguarding and speech regulation, and that some of this is costly. To win marks it must define "feminine" without stereotype, separate sex from ideology and education, and admit that the hard evidence on style is thin. Andrews is the text to engage, critically.
The evidence base here is large, so the hard part is choosing which studies carry your argument. Our John Locke Essay Competition tutors help students build a short, defensible evidence list before they draft.
FAQ
Is the feminisation of politics a good John Locke question to choose?
Yes, if you like evidence. It has an unusually strong empirical literature, including randomised and close-election studies a 16-year-old can read, and few entrants will have read it. It suits students who can stay calm on a charged topic. It is a poor choice for anyone who wants to write a manifesto for or against feminism: the judges reward evidence and argument, and advocacy language reads as weakness.
What should I read for the John Locke feminisation of politics question?
Start with Hessami and Lopes da Fonseca's 2020 literature review (open on the IZA website), which maps the whole field. Then read Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) on India's reserved village seats and Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras (2014) on women legislators and infant mortality. For the cultural argument, read Helen Andrews's "The Great Feminization" (2025) and the responses to it. Gallup's 2024 analysis covers the gender gap among young voters.
What does "feminisation of politics" mean?
It has three senses. Descriptively, it means more women holding political office. Electorally, it means the growing weight of women's votes and preferences. Culturally, it means a supposed shift in political style or values towards consensus and care, a sense that is contested and often used pejoratively. Joni Lovenduski's Feminizing Politics (2005) is a standard academic treatment. A good essay says which sense it is testing.
Is the 2027 Public Policy question confirmed?
Not by the Institute's website yet. The wording is reported from the John Locke Institute's October 2026 events, where it displayed its 2027 questions on cards. We have not yet matched this one against a second independent source, and as of 28 October 2026 the Institute's competition page still lists the 2026 questions. The Institute's website will carry the official list. If the published wording differs, the readings here still apply to any question on women and public policy.
Related
The John Locke Public Policy questions page carries this question with its trap and argument lines, alongside the 2026 Public Policy questions for practice. All ten 2027 questions, with the expected dates, are in our John Locke Essay Competition 2027 questions tracker. Two related 2027 questions: why are today's politicians so mediocre (Politics) and the consequences of economic illiteracy (Economics). For the standard the judges reward, read our analysis of the published past winning essays.
