Women at work: Gender quotas, municipal elections and local spending

Author(s):  
Francesco Andreoli ◽  
Elena Manzoni ◽  
Margherita Margotti
Author(s):  
Melanie M. Hughes

Around the world, countries are increasingly using quotas to enhance the diversity of political representatives. This chapter considers the histories and policy designs of ethnic and gender quotas that regulate national legislatures. Most countries with quotas target only one type of under-represented group—for example, women or ethnic minorities. Even in countries with both gender and ethnic quotas (called ‘tandem quotas’), the policies typically evolved separately and work differently. Women and ethnic minorities are treated as distinct groups, ignoring the political position of ethnic minority women. However, a handful of countries have ‘nested quotas’ that specifically regulate the political inclusion of ethnic minority women. The second half the chapter focuses explicitly on nested quotas. It lays out how nested quotas work, where and how they have been adopted, and the prospect for their spread to new countries in the future. The chapter concludes with reflections on the promises and pitfalls of nested quotas as a vehicle for multicultural feminism.


Author(s):  
Ruth Rubio-Marín

This chapter explores how human rights law has contributed to the shift towards participatory gender equality by legitimating the adoption of quotas and parity mechanisms to ensure women’s equal participation in decision-making. Since the adoption of CEDAW, human rights law has moved away from formal equality notions that simply affirm women’s equal political rights. Instead, we see growing endorsement of substantive equality doctrines that validate the adoption of gender quotas, initially as temporary special measures to ensure women equal opportunities, and, more recently, as permanent measures targeting the gender-balanced composition of an ever-expanding range of public and private governance bodies. The chapter explores how human rights law connects this participatory turn to issues of pluralism, calling attention to the need for public bodies to represent the full diversity of the population, and calling on state parties to increase the participation of women from ethnic minorities, indigenous groups, and religious minorities.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maciej A. Górecki

Abstract In a recent article published in Politics & Gender, Michael Jankowski and Kamil Marcinkiewicz (2019) study the effects of gender quotas on the electoral performance of female candidates in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) systems. On the empirical side, their study is a critical reanalysis of the Polish case, in particular the regularities demonstrated in a 2014 study that I coauthored. We argued there that at the micro level (candidate level), the effects of quotas were somewhat “paradoxical”: following the installation of quotas, women candidates tend to perform worse relative to their male counterparts than they did during the pre-quota period. Jankowski and Marcinkiewicz claim to demonstrate that those “paradoxical” effects are minor and thus practically negligible. In this note, I argue that their conclusion is largely a result of the particular methodological choices made by these authors. These choices seem unobvious, debatable, and potentially controversial. The note concludes that we need more reflection and debate on the methodological aspects of analyzing candidates’ electoral success in complex electoral systems, such as multidistrict OLPR. This would greatly facilitate future efforts aimed at an unequivocal examination of the contentious concepts such as the notion of “paradox of gender quotas.”


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