Using Gender Quotas to Fight Intraparty Battles

• In Event: Women and Political Parties

Abstract

This paper studies the role of gender quotas as a tool to consolidate power within political parties. I argue that party leaders can neutralize potential (male) challengers by strategically blocking their careers through the selective use of gender quotas in their constituencies. I explore this possibility in the context of the 2015 Mexican legislative election, in which a major party reserved a set of electoral districts for female politicians in order to comply with the legally-mandated national quota. Using an original dataset that combines information on reserved districts with results from the party's previous internal elections, I find evidence that the decision of what districts to reserve is indeed driven, to a large extent, by intraparty competition. Specifically, I find that the party leaders were more likely to reserve districts where the support for their faction in the party’s internal elections was lower. These findings have important implications for the literature on the adoption of party quotas, and provide a complementary answer to the puzzle of why predominantly male political elites promote the adoption of these policies.

Author

• Sergio J Ascencio, University of New Mexico