Femisocial capital: Homophily and bill sponsorship by South Korean female legislators

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.