Like a Bridge over Troubled Water: Gender Quotas and Women’s Representation

Abstract

The development of women’s representation the last two decades has put pressure on research explaining the causes underlying high levels. Dahlerup and Freidenvall (2005) argue that high levels of women’s representation have to be analysed from two ideal types, the incremental track and the fast track. Traditionally, women’s representation is considered to be the outcome of overall societal development and a measure of the countries’ gender-equality, advanced by the incremental track. The widespread adoption of gender quotas, however, has contributed to leaps in women’s representation in a broad number of under-developed and gender-unequal countries, advanced by the fast track. This thesis analyses the impact of three gender quota types (reserved seats, legislated candidate quotas, and voluntary party quotas) on the changed levels of women’s representation from 2001 to 2011. Particular attention is paid towards the countries’ regime types. By using statistical design and a large-N sample, the results from the regression analysis (OLS) suggest that reserved seats have contributed to a large increase in women’s representation. The most remarkable finding is that reserved seats and legislated candidate quotas have contributed to leaps in women’s representation in non-democratic regimes. The conclusions from the findings are threefold: first, the results confirm the importance of Dahlerup and Freidenvall’s two tracks to women’s representation. Second, studies of gender quotas need to consider types of quota to be able to capture the impact of quotas. Third, the finding highlights the importance of including the perspective of non-democratic regimes in cross-country studies of women’s representation and gender quotas.