The QUALREP project aims to produce a theoretically-driven analysis of the quality of women’s representation, attentive to intersectional and ideological diversity and with concern for the most marginalised.In a time when achieving women’s equal political participation and representation is formally recognized as a priority under commitments such as the UN SDGs and the EU Gender Equality Strategy, representative democracy continues to fail in the delivery of political equality for all women, in particular marginalised and minoritised women.This “poverty of representation” experienced by minority women across democracies, whose voices, interests and experiences are excluded from policy and debate is heightened in periods of natural and human-made crises and changes, and particularly in the face of anti-democratic backsliding and the rise of populist, anti-gender movements.QUALREP addresses this urgent need for renewed research on women’s political representation by investigating the institutional features which incentivize better representation and enhance connection, legitimacy and positive symbolism between women and their representatives and representative institutions.Through a comparative empirical analysis across five European nations — Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and the UK — QUALREP is committed to produce recommendations for policy-influencing and work with stakeholders to ensure their impact, thus contributing to contemporary debates on democracy’s fragility, inequality, and the need for institutional redesign to address systemic injustices.By advancing a theoretically sophisticated, intersectional, and empirically grounded understanding of women’s political representation, QUALREP makes the case that through improving the representation of all women, the wider health of representative democracy is supported in the face of its contemporary existential challenges.