“Paradox of gender quotas”: an experiment

Abstract

ABSTRACT The notion of “paradox of gender quotas” points to the possibility that under certain preferential voting systems quotas may be simultaneously favorable and unfavorable to women; while they facilitate women’s passing the candidate selection stage, the quota-induced increase in the number of women candidates makes the competition at the ballot more exacting to women. The extant literature on that notion has been based exclusively on observational analyses and is largely inconclusive. In this note, we distinguish two mechanisms through which the “paradox” may possibly operate: limits to the overall women’s vote share and vote splitting. We subsequently propose an experimental test of those. We conduct a randomized survey experiment that mocks a situation of voting under various scenarios. The results that we obtain largely corroborate the presence of the former, but not the latter, mechanism behind the “paradox of gender quotas”.