Women’s substantive representation under the Meloni government. Insights from a new dataset on parliamentary attention in Italy

Research on the policy consequences of women’s access to power is limited, especially in the Italian case, and it has yielded mixed findings. To help fill this gap, we created a new database containing all activities related to women’s issues carried out in the lower chamber of the parliament between 1996 and 2024. To demonstrate its potential, in this article we analyse the variation in parliamentary attention to women’s issues. We find that the latter has increased over time, but it has been fostered by left-wing parties. Still, although Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has failed to increase her allies’ interest in women’s issues, her party has been the one most attentive to those issues among the right-wing coalition partners since she has been in office.