The Global Impact of Quotas: On the Fast Track to Increased Female Legislative Representation
Abstract
Quotas have become an important mechanism through which women today are entering legislatures worldwide. This study shows that the introduction of quotas has helped overcome constraints on women's representation posed by economic underdevelopment, cultural influences, and even electoral systems. This study also demonstrates that the introduction of quotas offers the most explanatory power for women's representation today, together with electoral systems that allow for greater candidate turnover (i.e., party-list proportional representation systems). The majority of studies explaining women's legislative representation prior to 2000 focused on electoral systems, cultural considerations, and the strength of leftist political parties. Since the mid-1990s, however, an increasing number of countries have introduced gender quotas, which this article incorporates into older models in cross-national multivariate analysis.
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1.
1. The 25 countries are Belarus, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Republic of Moldova, Croatia, Latvia, Poland, the F.Y.R. of Macedonia, Estonia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia, Turkmenistan, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Russian Federation, Georgia, Hungary, Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Armenia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.
2.
2. At the time of writing, two governments use a system where a selected authority appoints or nominates women to the national parliament. We set aside this kind of affirmative action.
3.
3. The logit transformation is natural log(Rep2006/1-Rep2006). See Reuveny and Li (2003). We assign countries with no women in parliament with having 1% of women in parliament. Otherwise, they would be excluded from the data set.
4.
4. Where parties run as part of coalitions, we report gender quotas for parties if their coalition is the top one or two coalitions. Information on whether the political party is a “major” or “minor” party is from IPU (2006). In some countries, political parties may receive some funds if a female party member is elected. Systematic data collection has yet to be conducted on this; therefore, we do not count this as a quota, although it is a form of affirmative action for women.
5.
5. World Bank (2006). We use the natural log of GDP per capita for scaling purposes. If data are not available for 2001, we use figures from 2000.
6.
6. Compiled from The New York Times (2001) and CIA (2005).
7.
7. We do not present the results for models that test for interactive effects. Our tests indicate that quotas are not significantly more or less important across regimes types and electoral systems.
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Article first published: July 13, 2007
Issue published: March 2008
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