Beyond Institutional Reform: Responsibility Culture as a Missing Dimension in Women’s Political Representation

Despite significant advances in legislation, gender quotas, and equality policies across Europe, women’s political representation continues to display persistent disparities. While institutional reforms have increased women’s formal access to political office, they have not consistently transformed the cultural and organisational dynamics through which political representation is exercised. This paper argues that an important explanatory dimension remains underexplored: responsibility culture.

Building upon the RESC (Responsibility Culture) conceptual framework, the paper proposes that political parties should be understood not only as institutional gatekeepers or facilitators of women’s political participation, but also as cultural environments in which responsibility is interpreted, distributed, and enacted. Responsibility is approached as a socially mediated process that shapes leadership practices, decision-making, inclusion, accountability, and the recognition of women’s political agency.

The paper develops a conceptual analysis integrating political representation, gender studies, organisational culture, and theories of responsibility. Rather than treating responsibility as merely an ethical principle or an individual attribute, the RESC framework conceptualises it as a cultural dimension influencing how institutions respond to social change and technological transformation. This perspective helps explain why similar institutional arrangements may generate substantially different outcomes across political contexts.

The paper further discusses how contemporary technological transformations, including the growing influence of artificial intelligence in political communication, candidate visibility, and public discourse, reinforce the need to examine the cultural foundations of responsibility within democratic institutions. In this context, responsibility culture becomes a key analytical lens for understanding how political organisations adapt to emerging societal challenges while preserving democratic legitimacy and inclusive representation.

The article concludes by proposing responsibility culture as a complementary analytical framework capable of enriching current debates on women’s political representation and offering new directions for comparative research on political parties, democratic governance, and gender equality.

Bibliographical Note

Ines Caloisi is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Programme in Gender and Equality at the University of Málaga (co-supervised at the University of Salerno), where her research develops a comparative seven-country framework on individual responsibility. She holds a Master’s degree in Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (110/110, University of Turin) and is completing an Inter-University Master’s in Sociology (Sapienza, Roma Tre, Tor Vergata). She is the founder of the RESC (Responsibility Culture) framework and has authored several works on responsibility, gender equality and AI-mediated institutions, including “Beyond Compliance: Human Responsibility as a Foundation for Gender Equality” and “Beyond Compliance: Reframing Responsibility for Gender-Equitable Artificial Intelligence Systems” (13th International Conference on Gender and Women’s Studies, Melbourne, 2026). She is also the founder and CEO of Horizon Málaga S.L. and an external evaluator for the European Commission and national Erasmus+ agencies.