How legislative gender quotas affect the gender gap in campaign spending: an analysis of the federal and regional elections in Belgium

Smulders, Jef; Put, Gert-Jan; Maddens, Bart

doi:10.1080/17457289.2018.1446143

Cited by 13 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…In interpreting the results, some caution is warranted given research showing that the fundraising disadvantages that women initially face following implementation of a quota may diminish over time as women become more fully integrated into the political system (Smulders et al, 2019). This study includes data from a single 'gender quota' election (2016) and, at the time of writing, expenditure data was not yet available for the 2020 general election.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hillman (2018) found that Indonesia's open-list proportional representation (PR) system encouraged intraparty competition that escalated campaign spending, putting women candidates at a disadvantage because cultural and economic limitations made it more difficult for them to fundraise. In a study of nine elections in Belgium, Smulders et al (2019) find that the effects of gender quotas on campaign finances may change over time. When the quota was made stricter, the gender gap in finances expanded for both realistic and unrealistic candidates.…”

Section: Campaign Finances and Gender Quotasmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Money matters: The impact of gender quotas on campaign spending for women candidates

Buckley

Mariani

2021

International Political Science Review

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Despite concerns that women candidates are hampered by gender gaps in campaign financing, few scholars have examined how gender quotas impact women candidates’ access to campaign funds. We examine the effect of a party-based gender quota on women candidates’ financing and electoral success in Ireland. Under the gender quota, the number of women candidates increased and parties acted strategically to provide women challengers with increased financial support. However, women challengers spent less candidate funds than men challengers and were less likely to have prior officeholding experiences associated with fundraising. Women challengers’ disadvantage is concerning because candidate expenditures are associated with winning votes. Our findings show that the effectiveness of a gender quota is partly determined by how the quota interacts with the campaign finance system and the political opportunity structure.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Campaign Finances and Gender Quotasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Money matters: The impact of gender quotas on campaign spending for women candidates

Buckley

Mariani

2021

International Political Science Review

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“…Smulders et al. (2019: 56) notice that the literal effect of the 1994 Belgian quota law was just to legally sanction the status quo as regards the proportions of women on parties’ lists. And yet, the first election held under the regime of legislated quotas saw an 11.3 pp increase in the proportion of female MPs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, the initial post‐quota election saw a substantial increase in the proportion of women among the candidates featuring at ‘realistic’ ballot positions (Put & Maddens 2013; Smulders et al. 2019: 50). ‘Realistic’ positions are defined as the N+1 top slots on a party's list, N being equal to the number of seats won by the party during the previous election (Smulders et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…‘Realistic’ positions are defined as the N+1 top slots on a party's list, N being equal to the number of seats won by the party during the previous election (Smulders et al. 2019: 47). Being ranked as ‘realistic’ has important implications for a candidate's campaigning potential because Belgian electoral law allows ‘realistic’ candidates to spend even 10 times more money than others are permitted to.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Legislated candidate quotas and women's descriptive representation in preferential voting systems

Górecki

Pierzgalski

2021

European J Political Res

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Recent decades have seen a worldwide diffusion of electoral gender quotas, an institution designed to enhance women's political representation. This has sparked scholars' interest in the actual effects of quotas, including their impact on female descriptive (numeric) representation in national legislatures. As with many other issues within the domain of comparative politics, however, establishing causality with respect to the effect of quota laws is intrinsically difficult. In this article, we attempt to overcome these difficulties. We apply the generalised synthetic control method to study the impact of legislated candidate quotas on the descriptive parliamentary representation of women in three European countries: Belgium, Greece and Poland. As these states elect their national parliaments by means of variants of a proportional representation system with preferential voting for candidates, we compare their levels of female descriptive representation to a set of corresponding figures observed for a 'synthetic control' unit, comprising 16 European countries that implement fundamentally similar electoral systems but do not have legislated candidate quotas in place. The quota effects that we obtain vary substantially among the three cases analysed. The apparent effect for Belgium is strong, while much weaker effects are observed for the two other states. Relying on the extant literature, we qualitatively interpret these results, putting forward a number of conjectures as to how contextual factors can contribute to the strength and persistence of quota effects. We conclude that the impact of legislated candidate quotas is essentially limited, albeit it may be magnified under favourable contextual conditions, such as those which occurred in Belgium.

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Campaign Finance

Weschle

2023

Studies in Public Choice

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How legislative gender quotas affect the gender gap in campaign spending: an analysis of the federal and regional elections in Belgium

Cited by 13 publications

References 43 publications

Money matters: The impact of gender quotas on campaign spending for women candidates

Money matters: The impact of gender quotas on campaign spending for women candidates

Legislated candidate quotas and women's descriptive representation in preferential voting systems

Campaign Finance

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