Do gender quotas influence women's representation and policies?

• Author: Chen, Li-Ju
• Position: Report

1. Introduction

   An increasing number of countries are currently introducing various types of gender quotas in public elections to reach a gender balance in political institutions. Most developing countries introduced electoral gender quotas during the 1990s, mainly due to the influence of the UN Conference on Women held in Beijing. (2) On the other hand, most developed countries adopted gender quotas 10 or 15 years prior to the Conference. A dramatic change has taken place in the established rank order of countries regarding the level of women's political representation. The five Nordic countries, which for many years were almost alone at the top of the list, are now being challenged by amazingly fast development in a number of countries around the globe. For example, Rwanda superseded Sweden as number one in the world in terms of women's parliamentary representation--48.8% women against Sweden's 45.3% in 2003, and has more than 50% of seats for female legislators since 2008.

   The core idea behind the gender quota systems is to recruit women into political positions and to ensure that women are not isolated in political life. The evidence suggests that women tend to have systematically different preferences for household spending. The incorporation of women's concerns in decision-making would, thereby, improve the nature of the public sphere. In addition, women's representation can also have an indirect influence by increasing men's attention to policies concerning women and children. (3) Quota systems therefore aim at ensuring that women constitute a certain number or percentage of the members of a body, whether it is a candidate list, a parliamentary assembly, a committee, or a government.

   Theoretically, if the candidates do not commit to implement specific policies once elected, the identity of the legislator matters for policy determination (Besley and Coate, 1997, and Osborne and Slivinski, 1996). This influence on policy increases as there is increasing political representation of a group. Therefore, if gender quota systems lead to a pronounced increase in women's representation in politics, we should observe that government gives higher weights to policy outcomes related to women's concerns after introducing a gender quota system.

   However, existing empirical studies focus on the effect of political reservations on policy outcomes in the case of an individual country. (4) Do quotas work as well in general? Some countries take gender quotas as a symbolic policy to reflect the demand for gender equality without making related changes in institutions. The use of quotas is thereby not sufficient to ensure high levels of women in parliament. (5) On the other hand, a high level of representation might be achieved without quotas, such as that achieved in Nordic countries. I therefore first investigate the effect of quotas on the representation of women in parliament. Taking the introduction of quotas as an exogenous source of variation, I can thereby compare women's representation before and after the policy is applied.

   I then examine government spending on different functions before and after the introduction of quotas to check whether political reservations have increased expenditures on groups that should benefit from the mandate. Under the assumption that gender quotas have neither a direct impact on policy outcomes nor an influence on policy outcomes through channels other than the proportion of female legislators, I use gender quotas as an instrument for female legislators and study the effect of female legislators on policy outcomes.

   The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the background of women's preference and gender quota systems adopted around the world. Section 3 discusses the empirical strategy and data collection. Section 4 presents the results of the analysis. Section 5 provides robustness checks and section 6 concludes.

2. Backgrounds

   2.1 Women's preference

   What concerns women? Edlund and Pande (2002) argue that the traditional division of labor between men and women results in different preferences between women and men. Women tend to purchase goods for children and for general household consumption because they have default rights to children conventionally. Men, on other hand, get part of the right only if they sign a contract for marriage where they promise to provide for their wife and children. However, the rise in the divorce rate, delayed marriage, non-marital fertility and cohabitation in recent decades is suggested to lead women to prefer redistribution policies since the obligation to provide for the family no longer rests solely on the husband. (6) Women may therefore favor those policies related to children and family, such as education, health, and welfare issues, more than men when they participate in the decision-making process. However, there is nothing normative about this kind of model.

   2.2 What are quotas?

   Quotas for women are a form of affirmative action to help them overcome the obstacles that prevent them from entering politics in the same way as their male colleagues. There are different types of quotas. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), the main distinction based on the mandating is between voluntary party quotas and legal gender quotas. (7)

   Voluntary party quotas are adopted by political parties, and are set by the parties themselves to guarantee the nomination of a certain number or proportion of women. On the other hand, legal gender quotas are mandated either by the constitution or by the electoral law, obliging all political entities participating in elections to apply them equally. (8) Although non-compliance with legislative or constitutional quotas can result in penalties for those political entities that do not apply them, it is not at all evident that legal gender quotas are more efficient than political party quotas in increasing the number of women in parliament. (9) The effectiveness of legal quotas depends on the actual rules and the possible sanctions for non-compliance, as well as on the general crucial issue like whether there is any rule considering the rank order of women candidates on the ballot. Additionally, legal quotas may be introduced after a heated debate, but then have no effect on increasing women's representation because there are no mechanisms to ensure their implementation.

   2.3 The world of quotas

   Dahlerup (2006) defines two different tracks to equal political representation for women and men, which are the incremental track and the fast track. While the incremental track, such as what is used in Scandinavia, rests on a gradual increase in women's overall resources and on gradual historical changes in the perceptions of womanhood, the fast track represents a historical leap forward in women's representation, such as those used in Latin America and Africa.

   It took approximately 60 years for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden to exceed the 20% threshold, and 70 years to reach 30% female representation in parliament. (10) However, quotas were not introduced among these countries until women had already reached about 25% of the seats in 1980s, which was, at that time, also the highest proportions in the world. Quotas are not only for minimum requirements, but also for gender balance in this area. Similar tracks can be found within other developed countries in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. (11) In all countries, these policies originated with women in civil society and inside the political parties, who presented gender quotas as a way to win support among female voters. (12)

   In contrast, the fast track method is a common situation among developing countries because women do not have the same political resources as men. Therefore, the responsibility for dealing with the under-representation of women rests with the political institutions. In line with this conception of women's under-representation, mandated quotas for the recruitment and election of female candidates are needed. In 1990 the UN Economic and Social Council endorsed a target of 30% women in decision-making positions in the world by 1995. However, in 1995, only 10% of the world's parliamentary members were women. The Beijing Platform in 1995, on the other hand, has been very influential, and women's movements all over the world have attempted to give the controversial demand for gender quotas legitimacy by referring to the Platform for Action.

   Latin America is the leading continent when it comes to the introduction of gender quotas in politics after the Beijing Platform. (13) All countries adopted them between 1996 and 2000, with the exception of Argentina, which acted earlier in 1991. Since economic reforms during the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s aiming at reduced public spending had a significantly negative impact on women's living conditions, the epicenter of Latin American women's struggles was the process of redemocratization, strategically focused on enforcing their rights as women and as citizens in the political and social dimensions. Africa is another continent with countries introducing gender quotas mostly after 1995. (14) There has been perhaps a greater reliance on constitutionally mandated reserved seats in Africa compared with other regions in the world. This may reflect a greater concern for guaranteed outcomes in terms of female representation and a lack of confidence in party compliance or initiative.

   Other regions in the world are without a clear categorization of track. Countries in the Balkans did not allow questions regarding gender equality and political participation of women to be raised in any of the respective countries in early 1990s, during the transitional period. (15) Gender quotas were gradually accepted within the parties in these areas after the release of the Beijing Platform for Action. The Arab...