Equality prescribed? Contextual determinants of citizens’ support for gender boardroom quotas across Europe

Abstract

We provide the first cross-national comparative study of citizens' support for affirmative action policies in the economy using the example of gender quotas for company boards. In contrast to previous studies, we focus on the contextual level and analyse how factors related to political institutions and actors, and economic and social structure shape citizens' support and the gap in support between men and women. We apply multilevel regression analyses of Eurobarometer data for 27 European countries. Levels of support and gender gaps in support for boardroom quotas vary largely between countries. Contextual factors related to existing quota laws, gender equality in social and economic life, and public opinion towards state intervention are important determinants of cross-national variation. Our results point to an ambiguous relationship of support for gender quotas and actual gender equality in a country. Citizens' endorsement of quotas is low in countries with high levels of formal gender equality. Support is higher in countries where interventionist policies are widely accepted. Also, existing quota laws are positively related to citizens' support of boardroom quotas.

Who supports affirmative action policies for women and immigrants in recruitment processes? An international survey experiment

“…A previous study on differences in public support for the introduction of a gender boardroom quota across European countries pointed to large between-country variations (Möhring and Teney 2020). Accordingly, public support for a gender quota for company boards was higher in France, followed by Germany and then Denmark.…”

“…The dominance of US studies on this issue has led to neglect for cross-national differences in support for AAP. However, recent studies pointed to large cross-national variation in overall AAP support (Barnes and Córdova 2016;Möhring and Teney 2020). Moreover, we still know very little about support of AAP for different underrepresented groups.…”

“…We conducted our vignette experiment in Denmark, France and Germany. We selected these countries because they provide contrasting average levels of support of boardroom quotas for women (Möhring and Teney 2020), of prejudice against immigrants and women and of support for state intervention (Pew Research Center 2018). Figure 1 presents the average level of support for AAP for women and immigrants in Denmark, Germany and France.…”

How perceptions and information about women’s descriptive representation affect support for positive action measures

“…Given that we expect support for positive action measures to be influenced by overall attitudes towards equality (e.g. Kane and Whipkey, 2009) and attitudes towards state interventions (Möhring and Teney, 2020), our analyses also include measurements for these attitudes. Unfortunately, a variable measuring attitudes towards gender equality is not available in the dataset.…”

Untitled

“…Análisis sobre casos en los países del Norte Global destacan factores determinantes similares a los que configuran la preferencia hacia una mayor representación descriptiva de las mujeres, incluidas la identidad de grupo, los valores feministas (Keenan y McElroy, 2017) y la ideología de izquierda (Beauregard, 2018). Si se observa el caso de las cuotas de género en los consejos de administración de las empresas, el apoyo parece mayor en los países con un alto respaldo a las políticas intervencionistas en general, y menor en los países en los que las mujeres parecen estar más integradas en el mercado laboral; es decir, donde las mujeres ya parecen encontrarse en una situación más equitativa respecto a los hombres, los ciudadanos expresan menos deseos de disponer de cuotas de género (Möhring y Teney, 2019).…”