International Politics and the Spread of Quotas for Women in Legislatures

Abstract

Quotas to promote women's representation in the world's legislatures have spread to more than one hundred countries+ The diffusion of gender quotas poses a puzzle since they have often been adopted in countries where women have low status+ International influence and inducements best explain quota adoption in developing countries+ Promoting gender equality, including through gender quotas, has become a key part of international democracy promotion+ The international legitimacy of gender quotas leads them to be adopted through two causal pathways: directly, through postconflict peace operations, and indirectly, by encouraging countries, especially those that depend on foreign aid, to signal their commitment to democracy by adopting quotas+ An event history analysis, which controls for other relevant factors, shows that the hypothesized relationships exist+ Further support comes from a processtracing analysis of Afghanistan's 2004 quota+ Prior to the 1970s, only five countries in the world had adopted quotas to promote women's representation in politics+ Today, more than one hundred countries have done so+ With women's representation still lagging far behind men's-women made up only 18 percent of the members of the world's national legislatures in 2008-quotas have become a prominent way to promote women's representation in politics+ 1 Yet the global spread of gender quotas poses a puzzle since they have often been adopted in developing countries where women seem to have an otherwise low status+ As an Economist article wryly noted, the list of countries with gender quotas has been "joined in recent years by such feminist-friendly places as Afghan-I thank

Women’s rights INGO shaming and the government respect for women’s rights

“…Using measures of the number of WROs that reported a member/volunteer within a country, Yoo (2011) also finds no effect. Likewise, in a fully specified statistical model, Bush (2011) does not find that WROs are associated with gender quotas; Simmons (2009) echoes this null result when looking at the effect of WROs on the share of women in government employment. Cherif (2010) finds a similar null effect when looking at whether all INGOs are associated with women's citizenship rights in developing countries.…”

Aiming at the Wrong Targets: The Domestic Consequences of International Efforts to Build Institutions

“…However, another group of scholars are much less sanguine about external incentives and pressures. They warn that these can result in unproductive or pathological behaviors, such as insincere compliance, strategic manipulation or withholding of information, and the creation of "rational fictions" for external consumption (McNamara 2002;Bush 2011;Simpser and Donno 2012;Samuel 2014;Kerner, Jerven, and Beatty Forthcoming;Sandefur and Glassman 2015). We provide new evidence about one mechanism (target-setting) through which international actors set in motion incentives for governments to engage in unproductive signaling.…”

Change and Opportunity for Women's Political Participation Before and After Reform Era (A Case study of Women's Representative of Local Parliament in West Sumatera)

“…Less capability and fewer experiences as politicians mostly found within eight informants, most of them starting as politicians in the Reform Era. Even though there is a quota policy, this is still have not shown the significant result to improve women's politician to seat in the parliament [15]. Itmeans that as women's politicians, they mostly have to improve their capability and must work hardly twice compare to their male counterpart who already existed in the long period of politicians.…”