Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractThough more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the impacts of these reforms on women's political leadership remain largely unknown. We exploit a quasi-experiment-a zipper quota imposed by the Swedish Social Democratic national party on municipal party groups-to examine quotas' effect on women's selection and survival as leaders within their parties. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became more likely to appoint female leaders, but not more likely to support the reelection of women to the post. Extending this analysis, we show that the quota increased the number of qualified female candidates without increasing the diversity among women within the group. These results lend support to the notion that quotas may have an acceleration effect on women's representation in leadership posts and help dispel the myth that quotas trade short-term gains in women's descriptive representation for long-term exclusion from political power.Keywords: gender quotas; political leadership; party leaders; political careers; electoral reforms; women and politics; subnational politics JEL Codes: G34, G38, J48, J20 The widespread adoption of gender quotas is one of the most important political developments of the modern era. As these reforms have spread around the world, there is increasing interest in their broader impacts (Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2012). Despite our growing understanding of quotas' broader impacts, their effect on women's appointment to higher political office remains unknown. In particular, no study has yet considered whether quotas help or hinder women's selection to, and survival in, leadership posts within political organizations. This is a surprising oversight, both because of the potential significance of women's position in the political hierarchy for their descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation and the conflicting expectations generated by the literature. On the one hand, quotas may increase the supply of women eligible for leadership posts and give them more opportunities to join forces to support other women for top office. This means that quotas could have a positive "acceleration effect" on women's access to top political posts. On the other hand, both scholars and activists have linked increases in "quota women" to stigmatization and backlash effects, which means that quotas could produce a trade-off effect in which immediate gains...

Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden

“…Since our assumed starting point has a male leader in o¢ ce, more competent followers and more women followers both increase the threat to the incumbent for given l D . 41 The assumption that a higher share of women raises the threat to a male leader is consistent with the (context-speci…c) translating-numbers-into-in ‡uence strategy among Social Democratic women cited in the beginning of Section 5.2. It is also consistent with a (general) gender-speci…c component in policy preferences.…”

“…40 It also makes sense in view of the empirical results in the Web Appendix that the introduction of the Social Democratic quota had no e¤ect on the selection in the other parties or on election results. 41 Over time, as the fraction of women leaders increases, the nature of this threat could change as we discuss further when we consider multi-period implications below. 42 A large literature has argued that politicians'preferences are associated with their life experiences (Phillips, 1995), with gender-based di¤erences in such experiences being an important example.…”

Diverse parties, diverse agendas? Female politicians and the parliamentary party's role in platform formation

“…We also include an indicator variable denoting whether the party leader is female. Leaders are important actors in manifesto construction, and parties with more female MPs are more likely to be female-led (O'Brien 2015;O'Brien & Rickne 2016). This covariate thus accounts for the possibility of an intervening relationship.…”