Quotas as Opportunities and Obstacles: Revisiting Gender Quotas in India

Abstract

This article addresses the empirical uncertainty regarding whether gender quotas establish a foundation of political representation and experience that encourages female candidates to compete against men. It updates and expands existing empirical research by contributing an analysis of the most recent electoral data across four municipal corporations in India over two election cycles. Critical questions on the theoretical expectation that gender quotas should encourage and enable women politicians to compete in open-gender contests over time are considered. The Indian quota system has not encouraged women to broadly compete outside the quota at the local level but has made some wards more likely to elect women. Parties also continue to resist nominating women outside the quota but are more likely to do so in wards previously represented by a woman. Finally, the unique overlap of gender and community quotas can discourage incumbency by essentially blocking incumbents from running again in their ward due to shifting community requirements.

Illusion of Inclusion: Examining Trickle-Down Effects of the Board Gender Quota Regulation in India

“…Such stigmatization has been documented in electoral spheres in the short to medium term, where India has a long history of using gender quotas. For example, examining the consequences of an electoral quota for women, Turnbull (2021, 324) concludes that political parties “continue to resist nominating women outside the quota.” Relatedly, Bhalotra, Clots-Figueras, and Iyer (2018) document that a woman’s election after a quota led to a decline in the number of new female candidates in the next election cycle due to intensification of biases against women’s suitability for leadership roles. Therefore, introducing women through quotas may not only have implications for the majority’s attitudes toward female directors but also impact appointments of other women down the career ladder by reinforcing biases of women’s competence for such positions.…”

Gender quotas: an interdisciplinary scoping review

“…They argue that sudden increases in women's descriptive representation tend to induce increases in health spendings and, parallely, decreases in military spendings (Clayton and Zetterberg 2018). Some studies explore the possibility of a spillover effect ((Lee 2019) also talks about a pipeline effect) according to which quotas can positively affect the election of women beyond their perimeter of application; for example, from quota tiers to non-quota tiers in South Korea (Lee 2019;Shin 2014), from reserved to non-reserved seats in India (Turnbull 2019) or in Tanzania (Yoon 2016). At the interface between the notion of spillover effect and the transformation of inequalities in the political sphere, several studies tackle the question of elected women's promotion and possibilities of access to leadership positions, with limited results notably in the case of France (Lassébie 2019;Lippmann 2018).…”

Can even still be uneven? The effect of quotas in Portuguese local governments

“…According to the work of Turnbull (2019), political parties tend to fit into one of three categories in terms of their response to quota regulations: (1) those that comply with the rules and rely on the minimum threshold as the maximum effort to integrate women in their lists; (2) those that push forward and add a surplus of gender representation beyond the legal threshold; and…”