How do electoral gender quotas interact with the electoral process to increase descriptive representation? The case of quota mechanics in Panamá is revealing because it represents common factors in much of the region, but it is rarely considered in the literature. In fact, Panamá is often misrepresented as simply a legislative quota, ignoring the causal mechanisms of one of the worst performing quotas in the world. The case study of Panamá illuminates which quota provisions increase descriptive representation, shedding light on how quotas work in small states and how the lack of enforcement mechanisms fail to increase representation.Latin America acted as a forerunner in 1991 when Argentina became the first state in the world to establish by law a quota for the threshold of candidates that must be included on party slates, and Panamá's was part of the wave of quotas that spread throughout the region and the world in the 1990s after the Beijing Women's Conference. In 1997 Panamá adopted a legislative quota with a 30 percent threshold, in an open-list proportional representation (OPR) electoral system (Htun and Jones, 2002; Yet despite having a legislative quota and a high ranking on the Human Development Index, Panamá has had one of the lowest levels of descriptive representation in the world, averaging just 11 percent women in their national parliament since the adoption of the quota. Most of the region adopted legislative quotas in this period, and by the early 2000s they averaged over 18 percent women in national legislatures (Araújo and García, 2006). This paper presents a case study of Panamá that explores the puzzle of quota mechanics and descriptive representation through public records, electoral data and primary interviews to determine which features of electoral gender quotas are associated with increases in descriptive representation. This paper contributes to the study of electoral gender quotas and of the small and understudied state of Panamá. The findings speak primarily to legislative quotas in Latin America, but the conclusion offers insights which might enhance the analysis of other small states or comparative cases. The central hypothesis for analysis asserts that enforcement is a crucial intervening variable between the quota policy and descriptive representation.