Gender Equality In Political Representation Research Articles

Equality at the Polls: Female Representation Challenges in Musi Banyuasin Regency in 2019-2024

In Musi Banyuasin Regency, the quest for gender equality in political representation faces multifaceted challenges. This study explores the barriers hindering female participation and representation in local electoral processes. Through qualitative analysis, interviews with key stakeholders including female candidates, local officials, and community leaders were conducted to uncover underlying issues.The findings reveal several critical challenges. Firstly, structural barriers such as entrenched patriarchal norms and limited access to financial resources significantly impede women from contesting elections on an equal footing with their male counterparts. Secondly, despite legal frameworks promoting gender equality, cultural perceptions and societal expectations often undermine women’s political ambitions. Thirdly, the role of political parties emerges as pivotal, with varying levels of support and nomination opportunities affecting women’s candidacy viability. Moreover, the study highlights community attitudes towards female leadership, where biases and stereotypes persist, shaping voter preferences and electoral outcomes. These dynamics perpetuate a cycle of underrepresentation and marginalization of women in decision-making bodies like the local legislative council. Ultimately, achieving gender equality at the polls in Musi Banyuasin Regency necessitates concerted efforts from various stakeholders to dismantle barriers, reshape cultural narratives, and advance inclusive governance practices

Glass Half Full or Half Empty: Does Optimism about Women’s Representation in Elected Office Matter?

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen an unprecedented number of women candidates running for public office. Does the resulting potential for greater gender equality in political representation have downstream effects on individual-level political attitudes, particularly among women voters? Given the partisan imbalance in women’s candidacies, do Republican and Democratic voters experience the growing gender parity in political representation differently? We explore these questions by employing a survey experiment in the 2018 Cooperative Election Study (CES) that manipulates the perceived trajectory of women’s representation in politics. Our results suggest that priming future optimism as compared to pessimism in women’s representation has little overall effect on the gender gap in political efficacy and interest, but that party affiliation can be a moderator in this context. We discuss the broader implications of our findings for women’s engagement in politics.

Paridad de género y representación. El caso mexicanoGender parity and representation. The Mexican case

Abstract This article will critically reflect on the jurisprudence of the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice regarding the constitutional principle of gender parity. To do so, it will rely on a theoretical reconstruction of three different foundations of the principle, based on the understanding of the political representation of women and the principle of equality. I will call these positions: “of formal equality,” “of the defense of quotas,” and “of parity,” highlighting how the arguments of the last two positions are mixed in the Mexican judgments in a disorderly and incoherent way. Finally, the article will promote an interpretation of the principle of gender parity as dynamic and therefore open to progressive contributions from the feminist political subject, avoiding both the risks of essentialism and reinforcing the binary system of sexes. This principle requires, at this historical moment, corrective, provisional, and strategic affirmative action measures to achieve substantive gender equality in political representation.

Mobile Phones and Attitudes toward Women’s Participation in Politics

This study explores the relationship between technology adoption and attitudes toward gender equality in political representation by relying on diffusion theories coupled with frameworks of ideational change, social interaction, and world society. We examine whether the use of mobile phones shapes gender attitudes toward women’s participation in politics by making it more widely accepted that women hold institutional roles. We do so with micro-level data from the AfroBarometer, covering 36 African countries, and a multilevel modeling approach. Our results suggest that regular use of mobile phones is associated with more positive attitudes toward women’s participation in politics. The significant relationship—robust to the use of instrumental variable techniques—is observed only among women. This finding strengthens the idea that technology adoption on the part of women, by improving connectivity and expanding access to information, may be a successful lever to raise women’s status and promote societal well-being, ultimately contributing to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 5, which seeks to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Concurrently, the lack of a significant relationship for men highlights an important yet often neglected issue: policies aimed at changing gender attitudes are often targeted at women, but men’s attitudes can be stickier than women’s, thus requiring further efforts.

Promoting Gender Equality through Party Funding: Symbolic Policies at Work in Italy

AbstractGiven the growing importance of state subsidies as a source of party income, several countries have introduced policies that link the provision of party funding to the promotion of gender equality in political representation. Variations in the assignment of public funding—that is, financial incentives and cuts—are increasingly employed to promote equal gender participation in intraparty politics and in public office. However, we know little about why and how these equality promotion policies have been adopted in different countries, how they work in practice, and, most importantly, what effects they have on women's representation. To contribute to this debate, after embedding gender-targeted public funding regulations in the broader set of political representation policies and presenting a comparative overview of existing rules in the European Union, the article concentrates on the Italian case. We examine the evolution of Italian regulation of gender electoral financing and the extent to which the Italian parties have complied with the rules over time. The results show that this set of policy instruments, when poorly designed, is nothing more than symbolic policy. The lack of appropriate mechanisms for sanctions and rewards, which can induce parties to change their behavior, has hampered the effectiveness of these policy measures.

Tracing the Gender Gap in Political Interest Over the Life Span: A Panel Analysis

Despite recent advances in gender equality in political representation and the availability of resources, this article shows that there is a persistent gender gap in declared political interest over the life cycle. Using evidence from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we track the gender gap through the life span of citizens. At age 15, there is already a substantial gender gap of 20 percentage points in the probability of respondents reporting being politically interested, pointing to gendered socialization processes as the key explanation for such differences. In the following 10 years, as people develop into adults and unravel their political orientations, the extent of the gender gap continues to grow by about 10 additional percentage points. Following these formative years, attitudes crystallize and so does the gender gap, remaining at the same size (around 30 percentage points of difference between women and men) over the life course. These findings suggest that the development of gender roles during early childhood is a crucial phase in the source of the gender gap, deserving further attention from scholars.

What Explains Low Female Political Representation? Evidence from Survey Experiments in Japan

AbstractFew democratic countries have lower rates of female political representation than Japan, making it an excellent place to seek clues for female underrepresentation. We were surprised to find, based on three experimental surveys, that Japanese voters do not harbor particularly negative attitudes toward female politicians. The problem instead appears to be that women are reluctant to run for office because of socially mandated family roles. An implication of our study is that gender equality in political representation will likely founder in countries with electoral systems that require around-the-clock constituency service and legislative work, at least until citizens no longer have gendered expectations about time-consuming family obligations.

Power struggles: gender equality in political representation

Gender inequality in political representation remains despite widespread and long-standing feminist campaigns for representative equality. This article suggests that in order to increase our understanding of why men’s over-representation in politics persists, gender equality in descriptive and substantive representation should be analysed as power struggles. Power is operationalised as positional power and active power, and struggle as the interaction between feminist strategies and resistance. The article offers a rereading of the scholarship on gender equality and political representation through the lens of power struggles and concludes with highlighting some future research tracks.

The performance of politicians: The effect of gender quotas

This paper investigates whether the gender of elected politicians affects political outcomes at the municipal level. Relying on Italian administrative data from 1991 to 2009, we are able to instrument the gender of elected politicians using an institutional exogenous change: a gender quota in the candidacy list enforced only in a subsample of municipalities and for a short period of time. While the gender of politicians does not affect the general ‘quality of life’, proxied by the internal migration rate, it does increase significantly both the efficacy of policies targeting women and households, proxied by the fertility rate, and the efficiency of the municipal administration, proxied by the actual size of the administrative bodies. These results, which are robust to several specifications and checks, suggest that affirmative action enhancing gender equality in political representation may be beneficial not only in terms of social justice but also from a political outcome perspective.

Interactions between Party and Legislative Quotas: Candidate Selection and Quota Compliance in Portugal and Spain

About two decades after the introduction of party quotas, in the mid-2000s both Portugal and Spain enacted legislative gender quotas. The simultaneous implementation of party and legislative quotas raises questions about the potential interactions between two types of candidate quotas sharing the same goal – granting gender equality in political representation. Following a feminist institutionalist approach, this article aims at disentangling under what circumstances compliance with legislative quotas is greater. By looking at the different party institutional contexts in which candidates are selected, a double comparative framework is set. Firstly, we examine within country how legislative quotas affect political parties with dissimilar strategies to pursue equal gender representation. Secondly, we analyse across countries how they impact on political parties with differently institutionalized voluntary quotas. The article shows that legislative quotas are nested in political parties’ candidate selection process and that existing gendered practices and norms limit the effective compliance with such measures.

How Do Women in Developing Countries Increase Political Representation in National Assemblies? A Longitudinal Analysis of South Korea

Previous studies have found that political, socioeconomic, and ideological factors are critical determinants of gender equality in political representation. However, these studies have not explained the combined effects of these factors over time in each country. Furthermore, because they focus primarily on Western, developed countries, the experiences of non-Western developing countries have been overlooked. To fill this gap, this article uses data on South Korea from 1948 to 2008 to examine the effects of political, socioeconomic, and ideological factors on the level of women’s political representation. Results indicate that, compared to socioeconomic factors, political and ideological factors are more critical determinants of gender equality in political leadership.

Institutionalising Gender Equality in Spain: From Party Quotas to Electoral Gender Quotas

This article accounts for the particular steps Spain took to institutionalise gender equality in political representation. While some West European countries, where the ‘incremental track’ was considered too slow or too ineffective, recently shifted to the ‘fast track’ (notably, Belgium, France, Italy and Portugal), Spain adopted a legislative quota in 2007, when women's representation had already reached very high levels. Indeed, 10 years earlier, the quotas adopted by left-wing Spanish parties in the late 1980s had already reached parity and triggered a contagion effect within the party system. Comparatively speaking, Spain has followed the incremental track in a narrow time frame since democracy was restored in 1978. Finally, although the legal quota reform encountered political and juridical opposition, Spain managed to introduce it without the need for constitutional reform.

In the Balance: Women and the 2011 Scottish Parliament Elections

The victory of Alex Salmond and the SNP in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections has changed the political arithmetic of Scotland. Yet while Scottish politics adds up very differently, some numbers have remained stubbornly similar. Four elections on, the 'new polities' dream of gender equality in political representation has yet to be realized in the face of political indifference and party inaction. While the SNP has some high-profile women, only around one in four of the victorious SNP MSPs is female. Two of the eight new Cabinet secretaries, Nicola Sturgeon and Fiona Hyslop, are female, as are four of the ten ministers. Women comprise 31.6 per cent of the 19strong Cabinet, compared with 27.5 per cent of the SNP parliamentary party. Overall, women took just 45 out of 129 seats in Holyrood (34.8 per cent) in the fourth elections, compared with previous highs of 39.5 per cent in 2003 and 37.2 per cent in 1999.

Justifying Parity in France after the Passage of the so-called Parity Laws and the Electoral Application of them: The ‘Ideological Tinkering’ of Political Party Officials (UMP and PS) and Women's NGOs

More than 10 years after the strategic alliance in 1996 between women politicians on the right and left around publication of the ‘Manifeste pour la Parité,’ a qualitative survey of French party officials and NGO leaders at the local and national levels shows pragmatic consensus on the necessity of using legislative means to promote gender equality in political representation. Most literature on the subject either analyzes the genesis of France's so-called parity laws or quantitatively assesses their effects, saying little about how the laws call into question France's traditional political norms. This study focuses on the rhetorical strategies used by party and NGO officials to render the laws consistent with their own, diverse ideological positions. This ‘ideological tinkering’ has a political dimension; it also reflects the importance of nation-centered rhetoric and a low degree of awareness of prior European-level actions in favor of parity in political representation.

A voucher-based penalty recycling, banking and trading proposal to induce gender equality in political representation

Gender disparity and discrimination continues to be a pervasive phenomenon in many spheres of public life despite being targeted under the Millenium Development Goals. Nowhere is this bias more apparent than in political representation. The situation is critical in developing nations where gender inequality in political representation accompanies and reinforces other forms of gender suppression. This paper unearths a 'gender externality' that prolongs gender suppression in political fora constituted by elected members. The externality justifies government intervention in electoral financing to restore gender equality. The paper proposes and presents the rationale behind a voucher-based, gender penalty recycling policy and demonstrates how it corrects this social externality. The proposed solution exemplifies the role of economics in social problems traditionally considered beyond its orb.

How Women Won or Lost in the Japanese Lower House Election: Case Studies of Women Candidates Who Ran as Challengers

IntroductionIn the latest election for Japan's House of Representatives (Lower House) in June 2000, 202 women ran, and 35 were elected.This is the record high under the New Constitution. Another women was elected in the special election of October 2000, elevating women to 7.6% of the House of Representatives. Reflecting the enactment of 1999's Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society in 1999, major political parties in Japan recruited more women candidates than ever before. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) headed by Takako Doi—a women—had the highest percentage of female representatives (52.6%, or 10 of its 19 HR members). The Japan Communist Party (JCP) also increased its percentage (20%, of four out of its 20 HR members). This shows, to some extent, the advantage held by female candidates from leftist parties that advocate feminist concerns, such as gender equality in political representation.