Search Results

This chapter examines the ways women from different social and political groups gained national prominence in Peru during the Fujimori administration. It argues that the political interests of the President led to increased contact with a wide range of professional women and social leaders, whose interests overlapped with his. These women learned to operate within the confines of the authoritarian regime, and became important players in a political arena characterized by disorder and weak institutions.

This chapter examines the changes in women’s representation in Lithuania. Women are expected to make significant inroads in their quest for political power. Although the number of women in political power declined from the Soviet period, those who are active in politics have been able to carve out more authentic places for themselves, with meaningful power. Women’s representation and recruitment are increasingly included in the political agenda as the democratic system stabilizes and recovers from the chaos of regime change.

This chapter examines the under-representation of women in Slovene national politics. The main obstacles to female representation in the Slovene National Assembly are political. Female representation can be improved by increasing the size of the legislature to provide more opportunities for women to participate, eliminating territorial sub-units (voting units) and adopting a straightforward proportional representation system, removing the second tier by either using territorial constituencies exclusively or collapsing geographical constituencies into a single nationwide unit, and adopting affirmative action or quotas in recruitment.

This chapter examines the demand for women in the legislatures of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. There is currently little demand for female legislators, with a prevailing attitude in many countries that men make better political leaders. Although this view is most evident among older less educated citizens, it is sufficiently echoed by younger and better educated women. Support for the women’s movement in Eastern and Central Europe appears to be for a non-feminist, maternalist movement; men and women generally believe that the role of homemaker and mother is essential to a woman’s happiness.

This chapter presents a general model of female legislative recruitment based on literature on established Western democracies. It argues that institutions are important in female legislative recruitment. Outcomes depend on the supply and demand of female candidates, and the way institutions translate these factors into recruitment outcomes.

Democratization in Macedonia appears to have established a “machocracy”, rule by men. This chapter examines how machocracy has contributed to the low supply and demand for female candidates in Macedonia. It is argued that organized pressure to recruit more women can increase the supply of female candidates and the demand of party leaders for them. The experience with the mixed electoral system implemented in 1998 shows that the wider introduction of proportional representation can improve women’s representation.

This chapter compares campaigns for reserved seats in Pakistan and India. A shared colonial past included reserved seats for women in politics, as well as for a range of other groups based on race, religion, education, and occupation. After independence, however, the two countries took opposite approaches. In Pakistan, regimes of all types reserved seats for women from the early 1950s until the late 1980s, with a new round of reforms being introduced in 2002. In India, reservations for women were put off until the late 1980s, when their passage in various states led to proposals in the early 1990s to set aside seats for women in local government. Despite the quick passage of these provisions, attempts to extend these provisions to the national level have foundered. As a result, women occupy 21% of the seats in parliament in Pakistan, but only 8% in India.

This chapter examines campaigns for party quotas in Sweden and the United Kingdom. Before quotas, both countries had relatively similar levels of female representation. In Sweden, advocates pressed parties to adopt recommendations and targets in the 1970s and 1980s but radicalized their demands over the course of the 1990s, eventually gaining commitments from most parties to alternate between women and men on their candidate lists. In the UK, a major party adopted a quota in the early 1990s, which was later declared illegal on the grounds that it violated anti-discrimination law. Following a period of legal ambiguity, MPs reformed the law to allow but not require parties to pursue positive action in candidate selection. This has since led to significant variations among parties in terms of their recruitment of women. As such, women now constitute 47% of MPs in Sweden but only 20% of MPs in the UK.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion on the relationship between democratization and women’s access to political power in post-communist systems, and gender equality in politics. It then describes the general framework model on legislative recruitment that will be applied in the 12 case studies on female legislative representation in post-communist Europe featured in the volume. An overview of the cases, and their conclusions are presented.

This chapter examines female political representation in Ukraine. It is argued that although the number of women that have attained position of legislative power is relatively low, it is on the rise. This is attributed to three factors: increased party organisation, electoral reform, and the partisan distribution of electoral support.

This chapter explores the under-representation of women in post-communist Hungary. Female under-representation is attributed to a combination of electoral, cultural and party system factors. Women fare best when non-rightist parties are able to engage in ticket-balance strategies. The built-in majoritarian bias of the Hungarian electoral system discourages party gatekeepers from become pro-active in female recruitment.

This chapter examines the variations in women’s representation in Russian regional assemblies. A study of representation levels according to economic regions and distance from the Moscow-St. Petersburg axis show that women have done much better in peripheral regions than in the central regions. Political institutions such as the electoral system, district size, and the level of support for political reform play influence the variation in female representation. Political culture, measured indirectly using dominant religion, also plays a major role in women’s access to regional parliaments.

This chapter explores campaigns for legislative quotas in Argentina and France. Before quotas, these countries had almost identical proportions of women in parliament. In Argentina, a quota law was adopted in the early 1990s that required all parties to nominate 30% women. Although this provision amended only the electoral code and did not specify how the quota would be implemented and monitored, by the late 2000s, the policy had resulted in the election of 40% women. Around the same time, French legislators altered the constitution and electoral law to mandate that parties nominate equal numbers of women and men, with specific regulations as to how the quota would be applied and the sanctions that would be imposed on parties that did not meet these requirements. Despite these apparently radical reforms, the representation of women increased only incrementally to 12% and then 18%, still only barely approximating the world average.

This chapter examines women’s representation in East and West Germany. The variables that explain when and where women achieve representation work as well in the East as in the West. In both regions, proportional party lists produce more women deputies than single member districts. Each party tends to elect similar numbers of women in both regions, suggesting that party recruitment and election policies have similar effect in both regions.

This chapter explores the representation of women in Russia’s mixed electoral system. Cultural attitudes and weak demand for female candidates have discouraged Russian parties from nominating women in winnable positions. A combination of institutional rules, party fragmentation, and communist legacies have closed some doors to representation in the closed party-list proportional representation contest, but provided other opportunities in single-member districts for women.

This chapter sets out the collective theory-building enterprise of the volume. The first section reviews quota policies around the world, as well as research on their introduction and numerical effects. The second section outlines major theories and findings regarding women’s descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. The third section draws these two literatures together, reviewing the preliminary evidence on how quotas influence the attributes of the women elected, the policy actions of female legislators, and constituent responses to female newcomers. The fourth section establishes definitions for theorizing and operationalizing quota impact with respect to these three facets of political representation. It concludes with an overview of the following chapters, noting how the authors develop their research agenda, as well as how they relate to one another.

Denmark has a very inclusive electoral system, combining high proportionality, low thresholds, and meaningful voter choice among candidates. Its multi-party system results in coalition governments, many of them minority governments. Parliament is more representative socio-demographically of the population than most of its counterparts in other countries, with women forming a high percentage of MPs. The current system is widely regarded as working well, and there are few pressures for electoral reform.

This chapter presents an overview of the findings of the book. It reviews the framework developed for analyzing the adoption and implementation of gender quota policies, as well as the insights generated by the paired comparisons of efforts to institute reserved seats in Pakistan and India, party quotas in Sweden and the United Kingdom, and legislative quotas in Argentina and France. It then takes these comparisons a step further to explore what a look at all six cases together reveals about the origins and effects of quota measures. The aim is to provide additional insights for analyzing quota campaigns, and designing more effective quota policies, in these and other countries around the world. The chapter then concludes with a discussion of directions for future research.