BEYOND SUPPLY AND DEMAND:
GENDER QUOTAS AND INSTITUTIONS OF CANDIDATE SELECTION
Mona Lena Krook
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis
Campus Box 1063
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, Missouri63130
United States
Paper presented at the First Workshop of the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, December 8-9, 2006.
BEYOND SUPPLY AND DEMAND:
GENDER QUOTAS AND INSTITUTIONS OF CANDIDATE SELECTION
Women are under-represented in all national parliaments, but the extent of their access and exclusion varies enormously around the globe.[1] The dominant framework for analyzing these patterns is the theory of supply and demand, which proposes that the number of women elected is the combined result of (1) the qualifications of women as a group to run for political office and (2) the desire or willingness of party elites to select female candidates (cf. Randall 1982; Norris and Lovenduski 1995). While compelling, this model falls short in two crucial ways. First, it begins from the observation that men and women do not have similar rates of access to political office, but then does not theorize explicitly how ideas about gender might inform the dynamics of supply and demand.More specifically, the model acknowledges that gender norms shape the qualifications of women and the perceptions of elites, but compared with recent studies, underestimates the extent to which these norms pervade candidate nomination processes. New evidence indicates that women are less likely than men to deem themselves qualified to run for political office, even when they share the same backgrounds and experiences (Black and Erickson 2003; Lawless and Fox 2005). At the same time, male and female party elites tend to list characteristics associated stereotypically with men when asked about the qualities of a ‘good candidate’ (Niven 1998; Tremblay and Pelletier 2001).Altering present patterns calls for a more thorough understanding of the ways in which gender norms privilege men over women as candidates to political office. Second, the theory of supply and demand is presented as a simple interaction model that can be used to predict political outcomes, when in reality these dynamics are complex and the precise contours of supply and demand can only be known after the fact. Indeed, the tautological nature of the model obscures how changes in supply and demand may affect one another, at the same time that it fails to fully appreciate the limiting power of demand despite increases in supply. Research on gender quotas, for example, finds that the adoption of these policies often leads to a rise in the number of female candidates and a shift in the calculations of political elites (Davidson-Schmich 2006; Matland and Studlar 1996; Meier 2004), although the impact of quotas ultimately rests upon elites’ decisions to comply with these measures (Holli et al 2006; Jones 2004; Murray 2004). Unraveling these dynamics requires a new model of political recruitment that offers greater analytical precision in explaining variations in women’s access to political office across countries and over time.
In this paper, I combine insights from feminism and institutionalism to develop an alternative perspective on candidate selection based on configurations of three categories of gendered institutions. In the first section, I review the literature on institutionalism to define formal and informal institutions, identify patterns of institutional stability and change, and elaborate an approach focused on institutional configurations and bounded institutional innovation. In the second section, I draw on feminist research in political science to theorize three types of institutions bearing on processes of candidate selection: systemic institutions, the formal features of political systems that establish the official boundaries for political recruitment; practical institutions, the formal and informal practices that reflect the rules governing political recruitment; and normative institutions, the formal and informal principles that embody the moral bases of political recruitment. While many scholars focus on the importance of individual institutions in shaping women’s access to political office, I find that most studies implicitly acknowledge the role of the other two types of institutions, suggesting that institutional configurations – rather than single institutions – explain cross-national variations in women’s political representation. In the third section, I consider how gender quotas affect patterns of candidate selection. In reviewing three kinds of quota policies, I argue that each category attempts to alter a specific set of institutions: reserved seats address systemic institutions, party quotas tackle practical institutions, and legislative quotas revise normative institutions. I propose that quotas of all three types have variable effects on the recruitment of women because individual policies achieve distinct degrees of reform, interact in various ways with existing institutional arrangements, and intersect – at the moment of reform or at a later point in time – with the reform and non-reform of other institutions.The impact of quotas thus depends upon stability and change in all three sets of institutions, which operating as configurations determine how quotas promote – or work against – the increased selection of female candidates over time.
This framework synthesizes multiple theoretical, empirical, and methodological literatures in order to understand patterns of female representation as they emerge and evolve over time in countries around the world. The resulting perspective is feminist in that it establishes ‘gender’ as a central organizing principle in candidate selection processes, moving away from the notion that gender is only one among many factors influencing supply and demand. It isinstitutionalist in that it employs the concept of ‘institution’ to theorize the specific institutional configurations and patterns of configurational change that shape access to political office, improving upon accounts that reduce these developments to analytically vague shifts in supply and demand. In the process of merging feminism and institutionalism, however, this model also generates a series of new insights for research on gender and politics and the role of institutions in political life. For studies on women and politics, it provides a novel set of categories for conceptualizing women’s exclusion from and access to political office. Further, it offers tools for relating these dynamics to variations in the impact of quotas on existing patterns of representation. In terms of the literature on institutions, the model suggests a new approach for theorizing how formal and informal institutions work together in institutional configurations. In addition, it extends notions of institutional development and evolution to the study of multiple institutions simultaneously, calling attention to the ways in which changes in some institutions and stability in others may have variable effects on political outcomes. While the particular institutional categories elaborated in this paper concern gender and candidate selection, this perspective could therefore be adapted in numerous ways to study a wide range of other political phenomena.
INSTITUTIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
Institutions are a central organizing concept in the study of politics. Traditional approaches often employ the term to refer exclusively to the formal features of political systems, like political parties, electoral systems, and government bodies. In recent years, a new literature has emerged that explores the roles that procedures, routines, conventions, norms, and cognitive scripts play in structuring social, economic, and political life. It argues that these informal practices and ideas are also ‘institutions,’ as they guide political action as if they were formal rules. All the same, these scholars take at least three different approaches to the study of institutions and institutional change.[1] Historical institutionalists understand institutions as formal or informal procedures, routines, norms, and conventions embedded in the organization of politics, society, and the economy. Stressing asymmetries of power associated with institutions, they describe institutional change in terms of path dependence and unintended outcomes. Rational choice institutionalists, in contrast, view institutions as conventions created by actors seeking to solve collective action dilemmas. They argue that institutions survive when they providemore benefits to the relevant actors than alternative institutional forms. Sociological institutionalists, finally, define institutions to include formal rules, procedures, and norms, as well as the symbol systems, cognitive scripts, and moral templates that provide the ‘frames of meaning’ guiding human action. They emphasize the interactive and mutually constitutive character of the relationship between institutions and individual actions and understand change as an attempt to enhance the social legitimacy of a particular institution (Hall and Taylor 1996; Immergut 1998). Integrating these literatures, I outline basic features of formal and informal institutions and various sources of institutional stability and change. I then draw on recent work to point to the possibility of institutional configurations and the need to theorize ‘bounded’ institutional innovation.
Formal and informal institutions
Various schools of thought espouse a range of more liberal and more restrictive definitions of ‘institutions.’ However, scholars generally agree that these include formal rules and organizations, like electoral systems and political parties, as well more informal practices and ideas, like routines, conventions, and norms. Despite distinct theoretical frameworks, they also converge on two core aspects of institutional creation and institutional effects. First, they all stress the historical nature of institutions as conventions created intentionally or unintentionally by individuals in the past, typically through a process of conflict and contestation. As such, they highlight the human origins of many institutions that today appear to be ‘natural’ principles of social organization (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Douglas 1986). Indeed, some frame institutions as a response to the uncertainties involved in human interaction and thus as a means for structuring this engagement in more predictable ways (North 1990; Ostrom 1990). Once established, these institutions then largely reduce the scope of human agency to activity or choice within constraints, to the point that one person simply needs to tell another how things are done and individuals are motivated to comply because otherwise their actions and the actions of others might not be understood (Jepperson 1991; Meyer and Rowan 1991; Nee 1998; Zucker 1991).
Second, all institutionalists note in some way the relational nature of institutions as conventions that are constructed by individuals at the same time that they constitute these same individuals. In the process, institutions also often mediate relations among individuals themselves. More specifically, institutions influence individual behavior through an incentive structure or coordination effect, whereby common cultural beliefs or norms give rise over time to set of socially structured interests and an organized system of social incentives that outlast the moral imperatives that generated the initial beliefs or norms. Once a set of institutions is in place, actors adapt their strategies in ways that reflect, as well as reinforce, the logic of the system. Institutions shape relations between individuals in turn through a distributional effect, whereby in the course of structuring social interactions more generally, institutions intentionally or unintentionally privilege some groups while disadvantaging others. Institutions in this scenario are no longer neutral coordinating mechanisms but instead reflect, reproduce, and magnify particular patterns of power distribution, and thus crucially affect the capabilities of certain groups to achieve self-consciousness, to organize, and to make alliances (Thelen 1999; Thelen and Steinmo 1992).
Institutional stability and change
As implied by these dynamics, research on institutions focuses primarily on institutional stability, seeking to explain how and why institutions lock the expectations and behaviors of individuals into relatively predictable, self-reinforcing patterns, even in the face of major changes in background conditions (Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2000). These tendencies, as Paul Pierson (2000) points out, are especially characteristic of political institutions as compared with economic ones: while market mechanisms may potentially disrupt dynamics of increasing returns in the economy, various features of politics make increasing returns more likely, like the central role of collective action, the possibilities for employing political authority to magnify power asymmetries, and the absence or weakness of efficiency-enhancing mechanisms of competition and learning. As such, new political institutions rarely emerge, and often only in the context of crisis or great uncertainty regarding the future (Gourevitch 1986; Krasner 1984; Skowronek 1982).
A number of scholars, nonetheless, illuminate several potential sources of institutional change. A first group emphasizes human agency, theorizing change as the intended or unintended consequence of strategic action in an institutional environment that favors certain strategies and perceptions over others (Hay and Wincott 1998). According to this perspective, distanced awareness of the institutional context provides crucial insight into how specific institutions were constructed and thus into the interventions with the potential to disrupt the feedback mechanisms that reproduce stable patterns over time (Thelen 1999). Some note, however, that the process of dismantling an institution often requires a different set of tools than those used to erect it, since institutionalization creates new constituencies of actors with a stake in maintaining the status quo (Pierson 1996). Further, agent-driven change threatens to unleash a host of unintended consequences stemming from lack of attention to the broader institutional context, which incorporates multiple layers of frequently inconsistent and ambiguous institutional dynamics (March and Olsen 1989).
A second set of researchers stresses a middle ground between agency and structure, exploring the connections between shifts in actors’ strategies and transformations in institutional environments as sources of institutional change. They identify four possible developments that result in institutional reform and replacement: situations where changes in the socioeconomic or political context cause previously latent institutions to become salient, situations where changes in the socioeconomic and political context place old institutions in the service of new ends, situations where exogenous changes produce a shift in the goals and strategies being pursued within existing institutions, and situations where political actors adjust their strategies to accommodate changes in the institutions themselves (Thelen and Steinmo 1992). Athird and final group identifies the institutional order itself as a potential source of change. These scholars argue that if a given institution is embedded in a framework of institutions, it is less vulnerable to intervention to the extent that other practices in the framework have adapted to it, it is centrally located within the framework, and it is integrated within the framework by unifying accounts based on common principles and rules (Jepperson 1991). Conversely, individual institutions are more vulnerable in cases where a number of different institutional orders coexist and interactions and encounters among these orders create ‘friction’ between mismatched institutional patterns, forcing political actors to find new ways of advancing their aims through new institutional forms or through adaptation to take advantage of new institutional opportunities (Lieberman 2002; Orren and Skowronek 1994; Thelen 1999).
Institutional configurations and bounded institutional innovation
Despite careful attention to the historical and relational aspects of institutions, the literature in this field references – but is much less explicit on – the causal role of institutional configurations and the hegemonic tendencies of existing institutions even in the face of institutional innovation. Both are crucial for understanding institutional stability and change. They explain, first, why institutional reforms can have a number of possible outcomes and, second, why attempts at reform are often most successful when they stick close to reigning rules, practices, and ideas. With regard to the first point, some scholars observe that institutions do not inevitably fit together in coherent, functional wholes. To analyze outcomes, they advise decomposing institutional orders into their overlapping and conflicting component parts, at some level acknowledging the causal importance of these internal mismatches and contradictions (Lieberman 2002; Thelen 1999). This argument suggests that the effects of single institutions cannot be isolated, because a broad array of institutions operate simultaneously, variously supporting or blocking the effects of other institutions. As such, one difference in institutions across these configurations may constitute a qualitative distinction among cases, although not every difference will necessarily merit this type of distinction (cf. Ragin 2000).
Turning to the second point, students of institutions frequently describe institutional reform processes in terms of ‘bounded innovation,’ a dynamic by which existing institutional arrangements create opportunities for some kinds of reform but also set boundaries on the types of innovation that are possible. These dynamics mean that attempts to promote new arrangements typically reproduce or redefine existing rules, practices, and ideas, even when individuals hold different and conflicting views on matters of common concern (Weir 1992). Although such outcomes may appear to be the default option, and thus reflect a failure of reform, these scholars note that they are sometimes the consequence of a strategic choice, and thus represent an adroit political accomplishment. More specifically, because existing political institutions affect what is legitimately construed as a ‘problem,’ as well as what sorts of instruments may be lawfully employed to resolve a given issue (Bacchi 1999), reformers – especially social movement activists – often need to invoke accepted values and ideas and draw on familiar mobilization tactics to legitimate and motivate collective action. While these ‘framing processes’ restrict the options available to reformers, they also package complex and potentially radical new ideas into arguments and actions consistent with the existing ideals and dynamics of social life, and in this way present a potentially powerful – and even subversive – means for change (Benford and Snow 2000; McCarthy, Smith, and Zald 1996), because in referring to existing institutions activists contribute to subtle changes in the meanings of these very institutions. Consequently, institutional change occurs less frequently as wholesale replacement and more commonly as institutional layering, when some elements of a given set of institutions are partially renegotiated while others are left intact, and as institutional conversion, when existing institutions are appropriated for functions quite remote from those originally intended by their designers (Thelen 2003). According to this perspective, therefore, institutional stability and change are not mutually exclusive, but rather, are often closely implicated with one another, explaining at once both the durable and the dynamic aspects of political action.