Gender Quotas: A Comparative Analysis of Voluntary Political Party Quotas vs. Mandated National Quotas

• In Event: 477 - Section on Sociology of Development Paper Session. Gender and Development

Abstract

Women’s parliamentary representation exhibits substantial differences across countries. A particularly surprising aspect of these variations is that many countries with low levels of socioeconomic development have outpaced developed democracies in enhancing the formal political representation of women. In 2014, fifteen of the top twenty-five countries are characterized by the World Bank as less developed countries. This is a big shift from previous decades, when Scandinavia and Western European countries consistently had the highest proportions of women in national legislatures. Coinciding with these changes has been the increasing popularity of gender quota legislation to enhance women’s political representation. However, there are different types of gender quotas. Those countries that have adopted quotas in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America have tended to do so in the form of national mandates, which affect all political parties competing in national elections. Conversely, quotas adopted and regulated voluntarily by individual political parties have been the more popular route in Western, industrialized countries. This manuscript analyzes the effectiveness of different quotas across 168 countries from 1992-2012. Initial findings show that voluntary political party quotas are associated with significant increases in the average percentage of female parliamentarians; however the effect size is double in developed countries. By contrast, nationally mandated quotas are not statistically significant in developed countries; but have a large effect in developing and least-developed countries. Additionally, national mandates lead to a larger increase of the percent of women in parliament over time as compared to voluntary quotas.

Author

• Jennifer Rosen, Northwestern University