Resolving the Democracy Paradox: Democratization and Women's Legislative Representation in Developing Nations, 1975 to 2009 (original) (raw)
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American Sociological Review 77(3):380-408.
Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas—affect women’s representation in developing nations. We find that democratization’s effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women’s representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women’s representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife—but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of post-communist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women’s representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy—as measured by a nation’s level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time—but rather the democratization process that matters for women’s legislative representation.
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2008
Most studies find that the substantial cross-national variation in women’s legislative representation is not explained by cross-national differences in socioeconomic development. By contrast, this note demonstrates that economic development does matter. Rather than looking for across-the-board general effects, we follow Matland (1998), and analyze developed and developing nations separately. We find that accepted explanations fit rich nations better than poor nations, and obscure the effects of democracy on women’s representation in the developing world. We call for new theoretical models that better explain women’s political representation within developing nations, and we suggest that democracy should be central to future models.
European Journal of Political Research, 2010
The expansion of women’s formal political representation ranks among the most significant trends in international politics of the last 100 years.Though women made steady political progress, substantial country-level variation exists in patterns of growth and change. In this article, longitudinal theories are developed to examine how political factors affect women’s political representation over time. Latent growth curve models are used to assess the growth of women in politics in 110 countries from 1975 to 2000. The article investigates how electoral systems, national-level gender quotas and growth of democracy – both political rights and civil liberties – impact country-level trajectories of women’s legislative representation. It is found: first, national quotas do affect women’s political presence, but at a lower level than legislated by law; second, the impact of a proportional representation system on women’s political representation is steady over time; and third, democracy, especially civil liberties, does not affect the level of women’s political representation in the earliest period, but does influence the growth of women’s political representation over time. These findings both reinforce and challenge prior cross-sectional models of women’s political representation.
Explaining Women's Legislative Representation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2004
This study examines the relative impacts of social, economic, cultural, and political determinants on women's legislative representation in sub-Saharan Africa by using an ordinary least squares multiple regression model. Under study are sub-Saharan African countries that held democratic legislative elections between January 1990 and June 30, 2001. Only the latest election in each country is included for analysis. My study finds that patriarchal culture, proportional representation systems, and gender quotas are statistically significant. This study, by focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, fills a gap in the extant literature, which has focused on women's legislative representation in advanced industrialized democracies.
2018
Do countries that adopt parliamentary gender quotas do so as strategy in response to global pressure to improve the international perception of their democratic progress? Rwanda’s 2000 constitution called for a quota, and since then there has been a trend across Sub-Saharan Africa to “fast-track” women’s legislative representation. There has been a significant amount of literature on the use of quotas as signaling devices by autocratic regimes to indicate democratic progress. I argue that there is a gap in the scholarship on whether or not strategic gender quotas are efficient tools in achieving the regime’s intentions of appearing more democratic by the international community. I explore this relationship through both a case study of Rwanda as an extreme sample case, and descriptive analyses of certain data across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Freedom House Freedom Scores. Using statistical test methods and comparing sample groups of countries that have and have not ad...
Social Problems, 2009
Politics is arguably the arena in which gender inequality remains most pronounced. Yet in recent decades, women in some countries and regions of the world have made significant gains in legislative presence at the national level. But for women living outside of the industrialized West, we know little about the processes that facilitate their entry into politics. Through separate analyses of 36 high-income, 86 middle-income, and 63 low-income countries, I demonstrate that past models of women’s political representation fail to explain variation across low-income samples. Using multiple methods, I also explore two sets of factors that may be more salient predictors of women’s parliamentary representation in low-income nations: civil war and international linkages. Although historically women have been unable to consolidate gains made during wartime into post-conflict political representation, I find that certain types of civil conflict during the 1980s and 1990s positively affect women’s representation in low-income nations. Longer, larger-scale wars that contest the political system or serve to alter the composition of the government have the best prospects for creating opportunities for women to gain parliamentary seats. Brief case studies of women, war, and social change in Rwanda, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tajikistan suggest that structural and cultural mechanisms may work in conjunction with political openings to produce post-conflict gains in women’s political presence. Both women’s lack of political representation and the tragic effects of civil war remain enduring challenges faced by the developing world, but at the intersection of these two problems, there is hope for women seeking political access. Keywords: gender and politics, women in national legislatures, developing countries, civil war, international nongovernmental organizations.
Ratchets and See-Saws: Divergent Institutional Patterns in Women's Political Representation
Women’s representation in legislative and executive offices has increased in recent decades. We show, though, that while global legislative and executive trend lines have positive slopes, the two institutions experience distinctive temporal dynamics. When levels of women’s legislative representation rise, they tend not to slip back beyond their newly achieved level—women’s legislative representation tends to be characterized by a ratchet effect. This effect is relatively rare in cabinets, where increases in women’s representation are often followed by decreases. We call the latter phenomenon the see-saw effect: Countries experience one or more steps back for every step forward. These differences have normative and analytical implications. Normatively, we suggest that cabinet see-sawing is particularly problematic when domestic power balances are weighted toward executives. Analytically, we encourage researchers to use indicators of women’s empowerment that account for time and inter-institutional balances and identify factors that affect cross-country variation in temporal trends.
Peace Accords and the Adoption of Electoral Quotas for Women in the Developing World, 1990–2006
Politics & Gender 10(1):33-61, 2014
The high percentage of women in Rwanda's parliament is well known. At 64%, it scores far above the world average of about 22% (IPU 2013). Rather than an anomaly, Rwanda is representative of many postconflict developing countries that feature women's political representation at above-average levels. A frequently identified correlate of this heightened representation has been the presence of electoral quotas for women (Bush 2011; Fallon, Swiss, and Viterna 2012; Paxton, Hughes, and Painter 2010). More generally, the role of societal rupture and transitions from conflict to peace or from authoritarianism to democracy have been a focus of gender and politics research in recent years (Fallon, Swiss, and Viterna 2012; Hughes 2007; 2009; Hughes and Paxton 2007; Viterna and Fallon 2008). Within such transitions, the role of women's participation has been identified as a key determinant of more beneficial posttransition outcomes for women (Viterna and Fallon 2008). Peace processes and the accords that they yield represent a mechanism through which transition and women's rights become linked and theoretically hold the potential to shape postconflict societies. However, the link between women's involvement in peace processes and the subsequent adoption of electoral quotas has not been explored. In this article, we seek to answer the question: What is the relationship between postconflict transition, peace processes, and quota adoption? To this end, we examine the role played by peace accords and, more specifically, accords with a focus on women's rights in leading countries to adopt electoral quotas for women.
Regional Trends for Women’s Electoral Success in the East African Legislatures
Journal of Women's Entrepreneurship and Education (2014, No. 1-2, 153-172)
Without formally enacted methodologies, it is increasingly clear that meeting Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that stipulate gender equality and promote women’s empowerment would be extremely very difficult. Specifically, MDG 3 underlines the fact that women need to be politically empowered by far greater participation if greater equality has to be achieved. Under this goal, countries are expected to formulate deliberate policies that ensure equal representation between men and women in all decision-making levels including politics. It is on this note therefore, that countries in the East African region have enacted constitutional, legislative and electoral requirements providing for the principle of gender quotas as a policy measure for boosting women’s access to their legislatures. Based on a critical analysis of official reports, related literature and data provided by national parliaments, this investigation examines the gender composition of five legislatures in the East African region namely, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Kenya. The study underlines the power of gender quotas in expediting and equalizing significant gender imbalances, and also captures the types and nature of quotas used by individual countries. While appreciating the challenges involved in underwriting the affirmative action mechanisms, the analyses notes that affirmative action is not a slogan for politics but a strategy for development; it is a gigantic plan of action for achieving the desired social change.