Formal Change, Informal Legacies: The Impact of Gender Quotas in Ireland

• In Event: Feminist Institutionalism at 10 years: New Perspectives on Transformative Change

Abstract

Over the past number of years, gender quotas have produced undeniable, although uneven, changes to party candidate selection and recruitment processes across the globe, invalidating the assumption that gendered institutions are static and concrete. Despite these formal challenges to the status quo, male over-representation is still a global phenomenon and political institutions remain gendered both nominally and substantively. Feminist institutionalist scholars have been keen to look to existing institutions in order to unearth why these new rules have not had the transformative impact that their designers had hoped. The growing body of work stresses the importance of examining the institutional and discursive mechanisms through which male privilege is both maintained and reimagined in the face of official attempts at change. Using the Republic of Ireland as a case study, this paper speaks to and expands on this research and has two aims. The first is to explore and gender traditional candidate recruitment and selection processes in the Republic of Ireland. Particular attention is given to ‘the informal rules of the game’ and the ways in which male dominance has traditionally been reproduced through informal networks, localism and gendered understandings of ‘the good candidate.’ The second is to examine the interplay between these existing practices and new legislative gender quotas, which were introduced preceding the 2016 general election. The overall analysis considers the transformative potential of gender quotas in a broader context.

Author

• Leah Culhane, University of Manchester