Increasing women's representation Via gender quotas: The argentine Ley de Cupos

1996 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
Mark Jones
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer ◽  
Agustín Vallejo ◽  
Francisco Cantú

Abstract Are women disproportionately more likely than men to have family ties in politics? We study this question in Latin America, where legacies have been historically common, and we focus specifically on legislatures, where women's representation has increased dramatically in many countries. We hypothesize that, counter to conventional wisdom, women should be no more likely than men to have ties to political families. However, this may vary across legislatures with and without gender quotas. Our empirical analysis uses data from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America survey. We find more gender similarities than differences in legislators’ patterns of family ties both today and over the past 20 years. We also find that women are more likely to have family ties than men in legislatures without gender quotas, whereas this difference disappears in legislatures with quotas.


2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Millard

Poland maintained its open-list PR system but introduced gender quotas in the 2011 parliamentary elections in order to increase the number of women deputies. Yet this change had only a limited impact on women’s representation. The 2011 election confirms that ‘favorable’ electoral laws provide opportunities for women, but they cannot guarantee that women will be elected. In particular, the use of quotas alone is not sufficient to ensure high levels of women’s representation. The most important factors in explaining the Polish result were 1) the absence of a ‘zipper’, a list ordering that alternates men and women candidates, thus ensuring high list-places for women 2) the parties’ favoring of men in their list placement 3) the relative size of the political parties and 4) voters’ support for list leaders and incumbent deputies. Despite a disappointing outcome, quotas may be seen as beneficial in increasing women’s presence and the potential for further evolution of the electoral system.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meryl Kenny

While the 2015 General Election produced mixed electoral fortunes for the major parties, the results for women have been historic – 191 women were elected to the House of Commons on 7 May, including a record number of Scottish women MPs. This article reports on the 2015 GE from the perspective of women's representation, providing a gendered analysis of the election campaign and assessing the parties’ efforts to increase the number of women elected in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It argues that while the 2015 elections may have made some cracks in the political ‘glass ceiling’, further increases in women's representation are unlikely without greater commitment by all of the parties and without the use of strong equality measures, including legislative gender quotas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 124-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginie Dutoya ◽  
Yves Sintomer

In 1999, after a heated debate on gender parity in political representation, the French constitution was amended to include the principle of “equal representation” of both sexes. This paved the way for the introduction of gender quotas. In the same period, a bill providing reservations for women at the national level provoked a political crisis in India. The objective of this article is to compare both debates, looking in particular at the way women’s representation was framed. In France, the main argument against quotas was that republican representation should be unitary and transcend social differences, but at the end of the 1990s, women in mainstream politics were seen as one element of the dual nature of human kind, different from other categories such as class or race. In India, the specific representation of certain groups (Dalits, lower castes, tribal groups) had been the traditional framework for political representation since independence in 1947. But when the bill proposed to extend reservations to women, opponents of the project claimed that women did not constitute a category in themselves, and that sex should be intersected with caste and religion for the attribution of quotas. Looking at parliamentary debates, articles, and tribunes supporting or opposing quotas in both countries, we show that the arguments mobilized reveal different conceptions of the political representation of gender difference, which are partly transversal and partly specific to each country.


Author(s):  
Tiffany D. Barnes ◽  
Mark P. Jones

Tiffany D. Barnes and Mark P. Jones provide an analysis of women’s representation in Argentina. Argentina no longer retains the title of the most successful case of women’s representation in the region. Women’s legislative representation is just over the quota threshold—33%. They point out that the country has had more female presidents than any other Latin American country but lags behind in women’s representation among subnational executives, in national and subnational cabinets, and in party leadership. Gender quotas and electoral rules explain legislative representation, while political factors and informal institutions related to party selection processes for candidate and elected leadership positions are key for executives and parties. The consequences of women’s representation in Argentina have been significant in getting women’s issues represented and increasing men’s and women’s trust in government, and political engagement of women highlights that quotas have had pros and cons for women in Argentina.


2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aili Mari Tripp ◽  
Alice Kang

Quotas have become an important mechanism through which women today are entering legislatures worldwide. This study shows that the introduction of quotas has helped overcome constraints on women's representation posed by economic underdevelopment, cultural influences, and even electoral systems. This study also demonstrates that the introduction of quotas offers the most explanatory power for women's representation today, together with electoral systems that allow for greater candidate turnover (i.e., party-list proportional representation systems). The majority of studies explaining women's legislative representation prior to 2000 focused on electoral systems, cultural considerations, and the strength of leftist political parties. Since the mid-1990s, however, an increasing number of countries have introduced gender quotas, which this article incorporates into older models in cross-national multivariate analysis.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Högström

The goal of this study is to examine to what extent gender quotas have contributed to recent increases in women’s representation in parliaments. The results show that the effect of quotas on women’s representation in parliaments increased over time during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and that in the mid and late parts of the decade quotas are an important determinant of women’s representation in parliaments. However, the results from this study demonstrate that several countries that use gender quotas still have low levels of female representation in parliaments, which indicates that the designs of the quotas are important.


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