Resisting Parity: Gender and Cabinet Appointments in Chile and Spain

Abstract

Presidents and prime ministers possess vast powers of appointment. These powers can be used to appoint cabinets with an equal number of male and female ministers. Parity cabinets make dramatic statements about gender, representation, and political power. They imply that gender balance—rather than just adding some women—is needed to overcome women's political marginalization. Cabinets with just a few token women are insufficient and undemocratic. Yet appointing women in the same proportions as men challenges a status quo in which men occupy most of the positions of power. Even when leaders possess the formal authority to appoint ministers, forming a parity cabinet means that some existing practices and norms, particularly the norm of male dominance, have been broken. Parity cabinets thus create the possibility of backlash from those who fear reduced opportunities for men to access powerful posts.

Corruption and women in cabinets: Informal barriers to recruitment in the executive

“…A growing literature (e.g., Barnes & O'Brien, ; Davis, ; Escobar‐Lemmon & Taylor‐Robinson, ; Jacob, Scherpereel, & Adams, ; Krook & O'Brien, ; Mavisakalyan, ; Reynolds, ; Siaroff, ; Whitford, Wilkins, & Ball, ) has started to look at the macro‐level factors, such as the type of governmental system; the meso‐level indicators, such as type of party in power (e.g., left‐wing or right‐wing party); and the micro‐level determinants, such as the ambition of men and women to run for office, to explain women's recruitment to ministerial portfolios. Though several works mention the role of informal procedures in “engendering” recruitment to the executive (e.g., Annesley & Gains, ; Arriola & Johnson, ; Bauer & Okpotor, ; Bauer & Tremblay, ; Bego, ; Claveria, ; Escobar‐Lemmon & Taylor‐Robinson, ; Franceschet & Thomas, ), no study has so far examined the influence of corruption on women's representation in cabinets across time and space; our study is the first to conduct such an analysis.…”

“…As Claveria (2014) and Franceschet and Thomas (2015) point out, cabinets are selected by a very small set of people-or even a single person-and not by voters. Ministers have neither campaigned nor catered to supporters to cast their votes for them.…”

The gender politics of executive candidate selection and reselection

“…Fairly recent studies have identified the gendered norms and practices that underpin ministerial recruitment (Annesley & Gains 2010;Annesley 2015;Escobar-Lemmon & Taylor-Robinson 2016;Franceschet & Thomas 2015), but the acute gender gap found in top leadership positions poses a serious impediment to empirically assessing the conditions that may facilitate or undermine women's pathways to such offices in comparison to men. As a result, works on top executive leaders have tended to focus on women, but the reason why the ways in which political careers may be gendered cannot be fully grasped.…”

The Politics‐Administration Dichotomy: A Case Study of the Chilean Executive during the Democratic Post‐Transition

“…This represented a decrease of 19.19 and 15.15 percent respectively in ten years. This is particularly striking because the number of women ministers and undersecretaries is significantly higher, reaching 45.65 and 38.71 percent, respectively, in the first government of President Michelle Bachelet (González‐Bustamante and Olivares, 2015, 2016), in line with the gender parity policies she promoted during her first term (Franceschet and Thomas, 2015). The subsequent evidence, however, indicates that these policies did not permeate lower hierarchical levels.…”