Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Gender Quotas and The Representation of Women: Empowerment, Decision-making, and Public Policy

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This research investigates the impact of gender quotas on women's substantive representation. Gender quotas are electoral laws that mandate a minimum percentage of females that must occupy a position on a political party's electoral ballot. Substantive representation refers to women's ability to achieve significant representation of women's interests. This project contributes to the literature on gender quotas and women's substantive representation in three specific ways. First, it offers a critical test of hypotheses derived from two competing theories about how the number of women in the legislature affects women's ability to influence policy. Second, building on existing theory, new hypotheses are developed on how the duration of time since a legislature has adopted effective gender quotas affects the substantive representation of women. Third, an original data set is developed to test these hypotheses. The effects of gender quotas on the substantive representation of women at the subnational level in Argentina (23 provinces and a federal capital) is examined. Argentina provides the only context in the world that offers a lengthy timeline of gender quotas (over a 15 year time span) implemented across a variety of electoral systems (27 legislative chambers with gender quotas) as well as the existence of provinces where gender quotas were never implemented (or adopted much later than in other provinces). This considerable variance in the percentage of the legislative seats occupied by women across these systems is necessary to address the relationship between the percentage of women in the legislature and their effect on policy outputs. The long temporal domain is necessary to assess the duration of time required for gender quotas to significantly affect substantive representation. Furthermore, the subnational setting allows one to make controlled comparisons that are not possible in cross-national analyses. Women are underrepresented in virtually all of the world's legislatures. In the early nineties, there was a widespread call for national governments to take action to correct gender disparity (and promote gender parity) at all levels of political representation. To date, constitutional, electoral, or political party gender quotas have been adopted in 98 countries. While quotas have been demonstrated (under certain conditions) to increase the numerical representation of women in parliament, and are designed to achieve equality in legislative power and decision-making, it is unclear if electing more women to legislative office is sufficient to influence policymaking (particularly in policy areas of particular interest to women). The extant literature has contributed to an understanding of how quota laws in combination with electoral laws affect the election of women legislators. What is less understood is the substantive impact of increased numbers of women in the legislature resulting from the use of gender quotas. Increasing the number of women in legislatures is not sufficient; rather, women must have equal access to decision-making and leadership positions. This research will help us understand if properly implemented gender quotas are reliable tools for promoting democracy and should be considered in more institutions struggling with gender inequalities.