Violence Against Women in Politics: Unintended Consequence of Democratization?

• In Event: Backlash: Moves Against Gender Equality in the Modern Age

Abstract

After the transition from authoritarian regimes in the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American countries have struggled to improve the quality of democracy. Efforts to deepen democracy have focused on building up and strengthening political institutions. This has included creating or transforming electoral institutions to make them more independent; designing institutions to reduce corruption, and increase transparency, and accountability; decentralization efforts to give communities more control over the policies that affect them; and creating different measures to make governments representative.

Amongst all these measures, gender quotas to make governments more representative have arguably been the most successful of the reforms to deepen democracy: while countries in the region struggle with high levels of corruption, the number of women in politics has increased in most countries, the regional average more than doubled since 1997 according to data collected by the Inter-Parliamentary Union; Mexico and Bolivia have reached parity in decision-making, and ten other countries have over 30 percent of women in their national legislatures.

These results did not occur over night. As gender quotas were adopted, political parties used diverse strategies to avoid complying with the law, including changing their candidate selection mechanisms, nominating women in unwinnable districts, stacking women at the bottom of the electoral lists, among others. Along with these strategies, women politicians have also reported harassment and violence to force them to resign, leave the campaign, or act against their will, in efforts to undermine the gender quota laws. This phenomenon, named by activist in the region as violence and harassment against women in politics, has consequences that go beyond the individual woman who is affected: electoral procedures and democracy are undermined when violence is used to force political actors out. Using in-depth case study analysis, along with elite interviews with politicians and activist from Bolivia and Mexico; this paper argues that violence against women in politics is an unintended consequence of these efforts to deepen democracy. Violence against women in politics emerges as a result of power struggles between traditional political actors and new political actors. However, gender quotas are not the cause of violence against women politicians. Instead, violence emerges because efforts to deepen democracy focus on the institutional characteristics of democracy, without paying attention to larger societal structures that support democratic governance. The paper analyzes the measures that have been created in these two countries to combat violence against women political actors, and analyzes how the design of these measures, and their positionality vis á vis other political and electoral reforms determines their effectiveness and the possibility of truly addressing the problem of violence against women in politics. The paper concludes that measures to improve the quality of democracy and combat violence against women in politics must address structural inequalities between men and women, not only the effects of those inequalities in political institutions. By addressing the underlying causes of women’s underrepresentation -concurrently with the institutional barriers created by centuries of structural inequality-, women’s political participation -both descriptively and substantively will improve.

Author

• Juliana Restrepo Sanin, University of Florida