Gender quotas, candidate background and the election of women: A paradox of gender quotas in open-list proportional representation systems
Introduction
Save for a few exceptions, women's descriptive (quantitative) underrepresentation in the democratically elected parliaments around the world is an indisputable fact. On average, only approximately 22 per cent of the world's elected representatives are women (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2014). Poor descriptive representation may contribute to poor representation of women's substantive political interests (Chen, 2010, Holli and Wass, 2010). Thus, propositions of how to reduce gender disproportions in national legislatures have attracted much interest on part of both scholarly community and policy-makers. Gender quotas are one such mechanism. They are commonly considered to be a ‘fast track’ solution (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009: 5), a mechanism which, if correctly applied, can yield a reasonably quick increase in the numbers of women holding elected office. Since 1991, the year Argentina introduced the world's first national quota law, a number of countries have thus decided to rely on this solution.1
An increasing number of studies have attempted to assess the effectiveness of legislated gender quotas in various political contexts. A type of a political setting where, we argue, quotas have not been given due attention is countries using variants of an open-list proportional representation (PR) electoral system. While there exist various descriptive and aggregate-level accounts of the impact of quotas on women's electoral success in such systems, especially in Brazil (Miguel, 2008), Indonesia (Hoodfar and Tajali, 2011) and Peru (Schmidt, 2003a, Schmidt, 2003b), there are virtually no systematic micro-level (i.e. candidate-level) studies on this topic. This gap calls for a new analysis as open-list PR constitutes an arguably critical case for the assessment of the effectiveness of quotas. It is so for at least three reasons. First, unlike closed-list PR or single-member district (SMD) systems, open-list PR does not put major constraints on voters' ability to choose between male and female candidates, nor does it limit the effectiveness of their electoral choices. The scale of an existing gender bias is thus fully visible (Htun and Jones, 2002, Jones and Navia, 1999). Second, open-list PR stimulates high levels of intra-party competition and therefore candidates' background - especially political experience and the associated name recognition – constitutes an electoral advantage (Carey and Shugart, 1995). Given women's political underrepresentation inherited from the past, such an advantage is most often enjoyed by male candidates. Therefore, it might partly suppress the positive effects of quotas on female candidates' electoral success (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009: 16). Most importantly, however, being a woman might also prove advantageous to a candidate competing under open-list PR. As open-list PR creates strong incentives to ‘cultivate a personal vote’ (Carey and Shugart, 1995), minority candidates of various sorts – including women – might find it easier to distinguish themselves from the crowd and target specific groups of voters (Shugart, 1994, Valdini, 2012). In a political system dominated by men, voters might also be inclined to favour female candidates in order to promote equality (Rule, 1994, Kittilson, 2006, Valdini, 2012). An installation of gender quotas and the associated increase in the number of female candidates certainly limits women's ability to attract votes based on gender, especially as the ‘women-friendly’ niches in the electorate are certainly finite. We thus argue throughout this paper that under open-list PR quota laws have an inherently paradoxical nature: while they are introduced to enhance women's political representation, they actually tend to magnify the exactingness of an electoral contest for an ‘average’ female candidate.
In this paper, we utilise a unique micro-level data set from Poland to simultaneously test the above-mentioned characteristics of open list PR systems with gender quota laws. To this end, we focus on the 2007 and the 2011 election to the lower chamber of the parliament of Poland (the Sejm). Quotas were introduced before the latter election and thus we study candidates' electoral fortunes before and after the introduction of these regulations. Our point of departure is an aggregate-level observation that during the 2011 post-quota election a very large gap arose between the proportion of women among the candidates and the corresponding proportion for the elected MPs (see Fig. 1). Clearly, the introduction of quotas has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of female candidates but the increase in the number of female MPs has been rather small (note that before 2011 the proportion of women among elected MPs had been rising steadily even in the absence of quotas). While such a discrepancy between the proportion of women among candidates and the analogous proportion among the elected MPs is an entirely new phenomenon in the electoral history of post-communist Poland, it mirrors the regularities observed in other open-list PR countries that have introduced gender quotas. In this paper, we offer what we believe is a deeper look at this apparent paradox. We study the impact gender and candidate background exert on both the way candidates are ranked on party lists and on voter choice patterns. Our study shows that both the 2007 and the 2011 election saw a gender gap with respect to candidates' background, broadly conceived. Our evidence also suggests that this background was an important predictor of candidates' chances of being ranked high on their party lists and of subsequently attracting large numbers of electorate votes. More importantly, we also observe a paradoxical situation, an ‘average’ female candidate having had a much harder time contesting the 2011 (post-quota) election than the 2007 (pre-quota) one. This is suggestively reinforced by additional analyses showing that within a single electoral contest, especially during the 2007 election, the electoral performance of an individual female candidate is negatively correlated with the proportion of women featuring on the candidate's party (district-level) list.
The paper proceeds as follows. The next section elaborates on the conceptual and empirical aspects of gender quotas under open-list PR. The third section describes the Polish case. It points to the 2007 and 2011 elections to the Sejm as an ideal ‘ground’ for a systematic test of the impact of gender and candidate background on electoral results before and after the quota introduction. The fourth section outlines the analyses to be performed and describes the data to be used. The fifth section presents initial descriptive statistics. The sixth section describes the results with respect to party ranking strategies. The seventh section presents the analyses with respect to voter choice patterns. The last section concludes with a discussion of the contributions our results make to the understanding of the effectiveness of gender quotas.
Section snippets
Gender quotas in open-list proportional representation systems: concepts and experiences
Open-list PR systems offer voters an opportunity to support one or more candidates featuring on lists prepared by parties. The total number of votes cast for a district-level party list decides the number of seats a party obtains from that district. Seats won by a party are then allocated to its candidates solely on the basis of the numbers of votes cast for every candidate individually2
Quotas in open-list proportional representations systems: Poland
Poland introduced its gender quota law in January of 2011. The adoption of quotas was a process initiated and pursued by the Congress of Women, a new broadly-based women's rights association. Although the campaign for the regulations ‘became the field of an ideological battle’ (Sledzinska-Simon and Bodnar, 2013: 163), the wider public remained largely ignorant of the new law: only 22 per cent of Poles surveyed one month before the first post-quota election correctly identified the legal
The data and the concept of analysis
In this paper, we utilise a unique data set, containing information about all candidates having competed for seats in the Sejm in the 2007 and 2011 elections.6 The 460 Sejm seats were contested by 6187
Candidate background and women's electoral success: descriptive statistics
Table 1 presents basic descriptive statistics on candidates who contested the 2007 and 2011 Sejm elections.11 Most importantly, as the proportions of those successfully elected among men and women indicate, female candidates' success rate declined sharply after the quota introduction while
Candidate ranking: multivariate analyses
To model the probability of a candidate being ranked at a ‘viable’ position on her party list, we apply conditional (fixed-effects) logistic regression. This estimator is most appropriate for our purposes as it utilises only within-party-list variation. As this is a fixed-effects model, only variables that differ within party lists can enter the equation in the form of a constitutive term. The variables constant within lists, such as party dummies, enter the equation only in interaction with
Voter choice patterns: multivariate analyses
Our analyses of ranking strategies employed by parties suggest that a major change has taken place following the quota introduction. The evidence presented in the previous section indicates that after the quota adoption an ‘average’ female candidate was less likely to be placed at a viable list position than she was in the pre-quota period. However, this evidence is hardly sufficient to demonstrate our hypothesised paradox of quotas under open-list PR. In such systems, ranking can influence
Conclusion
Severe descriptive underrepresentation of women in the democratically elected parliaments might undermine not only women's substantive political representation but also democratic system legitimacy, for example by depressing voter turnout (see Karp and Banducci, 2008). Gender quota laws – a ‘fast track’ mechanism designed to enhance women's political representation – are thus a solution applied more and more frequently by democratic states. In this paper, we have focused on the effects of
Acknowledgements
Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the Midwest Political Science Association 70th Annual Conference, Chicago, 12–15 April 2012, the European Political Science Association 2nd Annual General Conference, Berlin, 21–23 June 2012 and the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions, Mainz, 11–13 March 2013. The paper was also presented at the Institute of Sociology Seminar, University of Warsaw, 21 February 2012, and at the Colloquium of the Mannheim Centre for European
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