Gender Equality Reforms on an Uneven Playing Field: Candidate Selection and Quota Implementation in Electoral Authoritarian Tanzania

Abstract

This article investigates the dynamics that gender quota reforms create within and between government and opposition parties in electoral authoritarian dominant-party states. A dominant-party state regularly holds relatively competitive elections, but the political playing field is skewed in favor of the government party. We investigate the circumstances under which gender quotas' goal of furthering political gender equality within political parties can be reconciled with parties' electoral concerns. We address these issues by analyzing the implementation of reserved seats by the three largest parties in the dominant-party state of Tanzania. The empirical analysis suggests that the uneven playing field leaves an imprint on the specific priorities parties make when implementing candidate selection reforms. Because of large resource gaps between parties, the ruling party CCM is able to reconcile gender 2 equality concerns with power-maximizing partisan strategies to a larger extent than the opposition parties. states has an even stronger strategic component related to inter-party competition than is the case in many advanced democracies. Party leaderships in dominant-party states thus face two concerns, based on two different inequalities, when implementing the quota reform. On the one hand, in the spirit of the quota law they should use it to strengthen women's political power within the party. On the other hand, party leaderships are hard pressed to implement the reform in a manner that primarily strengthens the party vis-à-vis other parties. While the first concern would prompt parties to select candidates who work 'for women', the second concern would rather have parties look to recruit party-loyal candidates. KeywordsUsing a feminist rational choice institutionalist perspective that brings together questions of gender, strategy, institutions, power and change (cf Driscoll and Krook 2009), this article aims, more specifically, to examine the extent to which parties in electoral authoritarian dominant-party regimes are able to reconcile the ever-present party electoral strategies with 5 the newer gender equality concerns that arise as a consequence of the quota policy.Entrenched informal practices as well as rational vote-maximizing behavior are important in order to fully understand the potential impact of any reform seeking to transform gender hierarchies (cf Kenny 2013). Our approach is also explicitly comparative, in that we want to see whether and how the possibilities for reconciling gender equality goals with electoral strategies vary across parties in dominant-party regimes.Our empirical analysis concentrates on the implementation of electoral gender quotas in a typical electoral authoritarian regime characterized by unfair competition between political parties: Tanzania. More specifically, we examine the implementation process of reserved seats (or special seats, as they are called in Tanzania) within the dominant party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and the two biggest opposition parties Chadema an...

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