Do Parties and Voters Counteract Quota Regulations? The Impact of Legislative Gender Quotas on Ballot Ranking and Preference Voting in Poland

Abstract

This article investigates how the introduction of gender quotas affected female representation in an open-list proportional representation system. Based on the Polish parliamentary elections of 2005, 2007, 2011, and 2015, it attempts to explain the gap between the share of female candidates and the share of female legislators. The authors estimate changes in individual electoral chances using logistic regression. Subsequently, counterfactual reasoning is applied to display the results in the metrics of seat shares. The analyses of candidate-level data demonstrate that after the introduction of quotas, significantly more women ran for office, but parties and voters, on average, changed their preferences to the disadvantage of female candidates, even when incumbency and previous electoral experience were controlled. The article demonstrates that women benefited from the introduction of quotas, but not right away. The desired effect of gender quotas (an increase in female legislative representation) was mitigated mainly by the unequal distribution of “electoral capital” among candidates of both genders. The impact of this factor was moderated by ballot ranking patterns. Once women acquire more electoral capital, the role of party elites’ negative bias in ballot ranking becomes more visible.

Party-Determined Viability and Gender Bias in Open-List Proportional Representation Systems

“…To start, it is worth looking at the supply of female candidates. This is especially relevant keeping in mind recent literature, which demonstrates interactive patterns between nomination strategies and voting behavior (Gendźwiłł and Żółtak 2019; Kjaer and Krook 2019). While a key focus of this article is voting behavior, we first need to establish whether there is elite bias in nominating women candidates.…”

“…This finding can be explained to some extent by nomination patterns: because of gender quotas, there is a substantively large positive bias in listing women candidates relatively high on the party list, regardless of their experience. The electorate then corrects for elite bias by ranking women candidates lower (Gendźwiłł and Żółtak 2019; Górecki and Kukołowicz 2014; Kjaer and Krook 2019).…”

Legislated candidate quotas and women's descriptive representation in preferential voting systems

“…This is because of factors such as poor enforcement of quotas and party‐level fragmentation of the Brazilian Congress. Furthermore, limitations of legislated quotas were observed also in Indonesia (Hillman 2018) and Poland (Millard 2014; Gendźwiłł & Żółtak 2020, but see Jankowski & Marcinkiewicz 2019).…”

A gender-generation gap in political representation? The contingent impact of preference voting in Norwegian municipal elections

“…Research on the impact of electoral systems on gender representation has in recent years not only distinguished between PR and majoritarian systems but also included other explanatory factors such as district and party magnitude, gender quotas and ballot structure (Krook and Schwindt-Bayer 2013, 564; see also Gendźwiłł and Żółtak 2019;Sundström and Stockemer 2015;Bergh and Hellevik 2013;Kjaer, Dittmar, and Carroll 2018). The empirical conclusions on whether female candidates benefit or suffer from preference voting are not clear, although much research emphasises that '[t]he overwhelming conclusion is that party and not voter discrimination plays the main role in sustaining women's underrepresentation' (Kjaer and Krook 2019, 446; see also Darcy, Welch, and Clark 1994, 149;Navarro and Medir 2016, 563).…”

“…First, research has for decades highlighted political experience as one of the most important qualifications -and more important than gender -when voters and local party branches vote for candidates in elections and rank the candidates in electoral lists (Stockemer and Sundström 2019;Kjaer and Krook 2019;Gendźwiłł and Żółtak 2019). Consequently, political experience -what Gendźwiłł and Żółtak (2019) call electoral capital -has been a factor used to explain gender inequality in local representation: male local politicians have traditionally been more visible and had more political experience, but '[s]eeing that women are becoming more visible in local politics, they are competing on more equal terms with men' (Bergh, Bjørklund, and Hellevik 2010, 120). There may be a generational difference in the gender distribution of electoral capital: older women may have less political experience than older men and therefore get fewer preference votes.…”