Femisocial capital: Homophily and bill sponsorship by South Korean female legislators
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/01925121221076405 |
| Author | Jiun Bang |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Research Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/01925121221076405
International Political Science Review
2023, Vol. 44(4) 557 –570
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/01925121221076405
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Femisocial capital: Homophily and bill
sponsorship by South Korean female
legislators
Jiun Bang
Colorado College, USA
Abstract
This article is about femisocial capital: a type of gendered political capital tended towards facilitating greater
intra-female collaboration. Unlike its similar conceptual counterpart of homosocial capital that typically
reinforces male dominance in politics, femisocial capital, at least within the scope of legislative activity,
highlights a positive function of gender and politics. By examining the bill sponsorship networks of multi-
term female legislators in South Korea, this article finds that the institutional legacy of the progressive
party in South Korea and its female lawmakers sharing associational membership in feminist organizations
(hence, the prefix ‘femi’), enables such gendered political capital to function in their favor. In contrast to
research agendas that seek to find gender working in explicit ways (i.e., whether more women in office leads
to greater empowerment for women in politics), this article shows that while gender does matter, it may
matter in much more discreet and less obvious ways.
Keywords
Political capital, bill sponsorship, multi-term lawmakers, network analysis, South Korea
Introduction
Women in politics have it hard. Virtually everything is negatively biased against women, whether
they exist in the form of gendered processes of candidate selection and recruitment (Johnson, 2016;
Verge and Astudillo, 2019; Verge and Wiesehomeier, 2019), gender quotas (Franceschet and
Piscopo, 2014), elite networks (Daby, 2020; Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014), or in the interaction
with institutional rules (Lowndes, 2020). In that vein, the term ‘homosocial capital’ has come to
frequently denote the type of political capital that specifically reinforces male dominance
(Bjarnegård 2013; Bjarnegård and Kenny, 2016) rather than refer to positive externalities within
any singular group regardless of gender. This, in turn, captures the reality of politics as a predomi-
nantly challenging space for women.1
Corresponding author:
Jiun Bang, Colorado College, 14 East Cache la Poudre St. Palmer Hall, 22B, Colorado Springs, CO 80903, USA.
Email: jbang@coloradocollege.edu
1076405IPS0010.1177/01925121221076405International Political Science ReviewBang
research-article2022
Original Research Article
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