Women's Legislative Representation Research Articles

The effects of liberal and illiberal world society on women's legislative representation, 1970–2018

AbstractObjectiveThis research investigates the impact of liberal and illiberal world society on women's legislative representation across a sample of developed and developing countries, and at the global level.MethodsI estimate fixed effects panel regression models with robust standard errors clustered by country.ResultsI consistently find that liberal world society embeddedness helps explain cross‐national and longitudinal variations in women's legislative representation across all three country samples, while illiberal world society ties matter at the global level.ConclusionThis analysis highlights the role of world culture in explaining the worldwide expansion of women's legislative representation across country development levels.

Electing More Women to National Legislatures: An Interplay between Global Normative Pressure and Domestic Political Regimes

Abstract Existing studies show that democracies are no better than autocracies in terms of women's legislative representation. This finding seems counterintuitive because democracies are more politically inclusive and foster greater respect for civil and political rights, compared to autocracies. We revisit the relationship between democracy and women's legislative representation by considering the interaction between democracy and global norms of gender equality in politics. We argue that democracies are better able than autocracies to translate a global norm of gender-balanced political representation into actual domestic practices. Further, we contend that the effect of democracies also depends on the external normative pressure. Using a time-series cross-sectional dataset covering 147 countries from 1951 to 2013, our analysis shows that the more democratic a country is, the more responsive it is to global norms promoting gender equality in politics. It also demonstrates that the effect of democracy on women's representation strengthens, as global normative pressure for women's inclusion in politics grows.

Point break: using machine learning to uncover a critical mass in women's representation

AbstractDecades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes. This study contributes to the debate using supervised tree-based machine learning to study the relationship between increasing variation in women's legislative representation and the allocation of government expenditures in three policy areas: education, healthcare, and defense. We find that women's representation predicts spending in all three areas. We also find evidence of critical mass effects as the relationships between women's representation and government spending are nonlinear. However, beyond critical mass, our research points to a potential critical mass interval or critical limit point in women's representation. We offer guidance on how these results can inform future research using standard parametric models.

Women and Legislative Representation in Nigeria’s National Assembly: A Detailed Appraisal of the 8th Assembly (2015-2019)

This study focuses on women legislative representation in Nigeria since the commencement of the Fourth Republic (1999 to 2020). It investigates the low levels of representation of women in the National Assembly and factors that explain this. Results from the study show that the majority of female respondents indicate active interest in politics but are discouraged by factors that include prevailing gender stereotypes, cultural/religious reasons, unfavourable political environment, lack of financial capacity, electoral violence and restrictive party structures and processes amongst others. The bulk of male respondents confirm these structural biases and barriers to women’s political participation. In view of these findings, some recommendations offered include implementation of deliberate policies and legislations that target women quotas and affirmative action, elimination of structural barriers to women's participation, reducing the cost of political participation for women, reforming the electoral process, and sustained and systematic gender education.

Multilevel governance and women's legislative representation

AbstractResearch shows that electoral systems, gender quotas and a country's socio‐economic development affect women's legislative representation (WLR). Less attention is paid to the effects of the rise of regional political arenas and multilevel politics on WLR. Due to less costly and competitive electoral campaigns, women can have easier access to regional legislatures. We argue that this relationship is mitigated by the distribution of competences between the different levels of the political system and that decentralization's effect on WLR at the regional level is dependent on the regions’ political power. To test this, we use an original dataset on WLR in 383 regional parliaments in 19 European countries from 1970 to 2018. Results of the three‐level models show that more political authority vested into regions leads to a lower level of WLR in the legislatures of the more politically powerful regions in comparison with not only the regions possessing less authority but also with the national parliament. Possible explanations for this effect, such as the attractiveness of these positions to the mostly male political elite and, consequently, increased costs and competitiveness of electoral campaigns, are suggested.

Women's Legislative Representation in Authoritarian Regimes

Recent research finds that legislatures in authoritarian regimes co-opt potential adversaries (e.g., Gandhi 2008; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007; Malesky and Schuler 2010) or provide regime loyalists with access to better monitor regime elites (e.g., Jensen, Malesky, and Weymouth 2014; Magaloni 2008; Svolik 2012). These two strains of thought suggest that membership in an authoritarian legislature tells us something about the nature of the authoritarian regime. For gender scholars, this is significant, since we there is substantial variation in the percentage of women in authoritarian legislatures. I argue that this variation in women’s legislative representation is the result, in part, of differences in women’s positions within civil society. As the role of women in civil society expands and the openness of civil society in general increases, women’s legislative representation increases. I test this argument with a dataset of 114 authoritarian regimes from 1972-2010. The empirical results support my argument.

The impact of the electoral system on the level of women's legislative representation in post-apartheid South Africa

In just two decades after the demise of apartheid in South Africa, women's legislative representation has grown in leaps and bounds rising from nearly nothing to over 40%, which is twice the world average of 20%. While this trend can be attributed to a number of factors, this paper casts a spotlight on the role of the electoral system structure vis-à-vis the changes in women's representation. The paper investigates how the proportional representation system and its associated features such as the use of closed lists, multimember constituencies and a large district magnitude have influenced increased women's electoral representation in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper further argues that while the electoral system has played an important role in the rise of women's representation, this explanation is hardly sufficient as statistics show that the rapid increase of female representatives is linked, among other factors, to the African National Congress 50/50 gender quota which has seen it contributing more than 75% of women representation in the National Assembly.

Introduction: Quotas and Non-Quota Strategies in East Asia

In convergence with the global norm toward more proportional representative electoral systems, many countries in East Asia have adopted quota strategies to address women's political underrepresentation (Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2012; Krook 2009). Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan provide ideal case studies to investigate the impact of these efforts. While these countries share similar economic development, educational levels, and Confucian communitarian ethos, their experiences and progress on empowering women vary. For example, the level of women's legislative representation in the region ranges from a low of 8.1% in Japan to a high of 33.6% in Taiwan. And while Taiwan and South Korea embarked on constitutional reforms in the 1990s and introduced candidate quotas or reserved seats to guarantee women's legislative representation at all levels, Singapore and Japan have resisted legislating quotas but instead set 30% women parliamentarians as targets of party strategies. This collection of papers explores this intraregional variation with a comparative view on the origins and impact of quotas on women's political life. Specifically, we trace the origins of quota adoption and how they interact with the existing electoral and party institutions to improve women's legislative numbers.

Party Quotas and Rising Women Politicians in Singapore

Women were severely underrepresented in Singapore's early politics. From 1970 to 1984, not a single female member was found in the Parliament. Unlike the experiences of Taiwan and South Korea in this issue, the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore faced no similar pressure from the opposition parties or feminist groups to adopt gender quotas to “fast track” women into politics (Dahlerup and Freidenvall 2005). Yet, the total number of women candidates increased from 0 in 1980 to 32 by 2011. And women's legislative representation reached a high of 23% after the 2011 general election.

Interdependence Effects in Mixed-Superposition Electoral Systems: An Empirical Test on Women's Participation in Sub-national Elections

Mixed-superposition electoral systems, while devoid of compensatory mechanisms interconnecting their proportional and non-proportional sections, may create effective linkages that exert some impact upon the behaviour of political parties. This article examines the resulting interdependence effects with respect to women's electoral participation and legislative representation. It is hypothesized that if political parties embrace the logic of ticket-balancing when forming their candidate lists in the proportional representation sections of elections, they become more willing to nominate female candidates in majoritarian districts, which creates an important interdependence effect that ultimately contributes to the increased levels of women's representation. This hypothesis is empirically tested on a sample of 139 sub-national elections held in Russia in 2003–2011, with some additional information derived from the results of 81 previously held elections. The statistical analysis confirms the presence of interdependence effects with respect to women's political participation. The principal contextual factor that intermediates the observed effects is political regime. It is shown that electoral authoritarianism mitigates the interdependence effects of mixed-superposition electoral systems.

The Intersection of Gender and Minority Status in National Legislatures: The Minority Women Legislative Index

To date, we are unaware to what extent gains in women's legislative representation have reached minority women. To facilitate cross‐national research on minority women in politics, I present and explore new cross‐national data on the election of women and men from 431 ethnic, racial, and religious groups to national legislatures in 81 countries between 2005 and 2007. I create a new measure scoring countries by minority women's representation relative to their share of the population—the Minority Women Legislative Index (MWLI). Descriptive analyses show minority women to be substantially underrepresented in national legislatures overall but their level of exclusion varies geographically.

Gender Norms and Women's Political Representation: A Global Analysis of Cabinets, 1979–2009

What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases in women's political representation? We argue that norm diffusion has larger positive effects on women's cabinet representation than on women's legislative representation. We also show that within cabinets, norm diffusion affects low‐prestige appointments more than high‐prestige appointments. We test these arguments using an original database of ministers from 1979 to 2009 and find that the association of women's representation with three separate indicators of international diffusion—levels of women's representation among neighboring states, levels of women's representation among intergovernmental organization partners, and time since ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women—is consistent with our arguments.

Party System Nationalization and Women's Legislative Representation

Many scholars have sought to explain the wide variation in women's legislative representation found across the globe. In this article, we open a new line of inquiry that seeks to determine whether differences in the nationalization of the party system help explain the variation in women's representation. In more nationalized party systems, there is little variation in the patterns of party votes across the countries. In more regionalized systems, patterns of party vote vary widely among regions. The existing literature on party system nationalization argues that more nationalized systems focus policy debates and policy outcomes at the national level. We argue that the incentive to focus on national as opposed to regional outcomes can overcome obstacles to women's representation similar to the way in which electoral system incentives create more opportunities for women. Using a data set of 45 democratic countries, we test this argument. We find no direct impact of party system nationalization on women's legislative representation. Yet, we find an interactive effect of party system nationalization and the electoral system. Increases in party system nationalization improve women's representation in concert with electoral system incentives that spur women's representation.

Fuzzy Set or Fuzzy Logic? Comparing the Value of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) Versus Regression Analysis for the Study of Women's Legislative Representation

In this article I compare the results of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) applied to a medium-sized data set on women's legislative representation in Asian and Latin American countries to those of regression analysis based on the same data set. I find that both methods are suboptimal. Explaining the outcome of high women's representation, fsQCA suggests complex configurations of conditions with low empirical coverage and high sensitivity to coding. While, not without shortcomings, OLS regression analysis performs somewhat better than fsQCA. On the one hand, this method identifies two statistically significant and substantively relevant variables (i.e. quota rules and communist regimes), which strongly increase the percentage of women deputies. On the other hand, the model's interpretation is not completely clear cut, as scholars may disagree over the relevance of the one marginally statistically and substantively significant variable, the longevity of democracy.

Do Women Legislators Have a Positive Effect on the Supportiveness of States Toward Older Citizens?

Increasing women in state legislatures is associated with greater legislative support for social policies serving families with children. We examine whether the family friendly impact of women legislators extends to supporting family elders. We draw on a cross-sectional data set of the American states in conjunction with regression. We find that, controlling for prominent alternative factors shaping state policies, women's legislative presence exerts a strong positive influence on state elderly friendliness. Our results are more exploratory than definitive, but they suggest that states with more extensive legislative representation of women better meet the growing challenges of an aging population.

Growth in women's political representation: A longitudinal exploration of democracy, electoral system and gender quotas

AbstractThe expansion of women's formal political representation ranks among the most significant trends in international politics of the last 100 years. Though women made steady political progress, substantial country‐level variation exists in patterns of growth and change. In this article, longitudinal theories are developed to examine how political factors affect women's political representation over time. Latent growth curve models are used to assess the growth of women in politics in 110 countries from 1975 to 2000. The article investigates how electoral systems, national‐level gender quotas and growth of democracy – both political rights and civil liberties – impact country‐level trajectories of women's legislative representation. It is found: first, national quotas do affect women's political presence, but at a lower level than legislated by law; second, the impact of a proportional representation system on women's political representation is steady over time; and third, democracy, especially civil liberties, does not affect the level of women's political representation in the earliest period, but does influence the growth of women's political representation over time. These findings both reinforce and challenge prior cross‐sectional models of women's political representation.

From the suburbs to the house: The metropolitan–rural population and the success of women candidates

We analyze the voting behavior of metropolitan and rural residents in relation to women's legislative representation. Examining election data on the U.S. House and all lower state houses, we find that the greater the metropolitan population in a legislative district, the more likely it is to be represented by a woman. We extrapolate from these findings that the modern increase in women's representation can be attributed in part to the rural-to-suburban shift in population and legislative seats.

How Development Matters

Most studies find that the substantial cross-national variation in women's legislative representation is not explained by cross-national differences in socioeconomic development. By contrast, this note demonstrates that economic development does matter. Rather than looking for across-the-board general effects, we follow Matland (1998), and analyze developed and developing nations separately. We find that accepted explanations fit rich nations better than poor nations, and obscure the effects of democracy on women's representation in the developing world. We call for new theoretical models that better explain women's political representation within developing nations, and we suggest that democracy should be central to future models.

Prospects for Women's Legislative Representation in Postsocialist Europe

Research on women's political representation in postsocialist Europe has highlighted the role of cultural and political factors in obstructing women's access to legislative power, such as the prevalence of traditional gender stereotypes, electoral systems, and the absence of a feminist movement. Yet, the role of women political elites in enhancing or hindering women's access to political power in the region has so far remained uncharted. This article seeks to fill some of the existing gaps in this literature by examining the views of women politicians with regard to women's political underrepresentation and their assessments of strategies for redressing this imbalance. Findings from the analysis reveal that although women politicians recognize gender inequalities in representation as a problem requiring intervention, how the problem is perceived, and the preferred measures to deal with it, is largely shaped by the social and cultural context in which these actors are embedded.

The Global Impact of Quotas

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.