14
State Feminism and Gender Quotas in the “North” and “South”:
Comparative Lessons from Western Europe and Latin America
Susan Franceschet
Dept. of Political Science
Acadia University
Wolfville, NS
Canada
Mona Lena Krook
Department of Political Science
Washington University in St. Louis
Campus Box 1063
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
U.S.A.
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association
San Diego, CA
March 22-25th, 2006
Introduction
Over the last several decades, state feminism and gender quotas have become the two most popular strategies worldwide for advancing women’s equality. State feminism refers to the creation of state agencies to improve women’s status through public policy. These machineries take on a number of different institutional forms, but now exist in more than one hundred countries and carry out a wide range of policy responsibilities (Stetson and Mazur 1995; True and Mintrom 2001). Gender quotas encompass state and party policies to increase the number of women among political candidates. These rules also appear in a number of different guises, but have now been adopted in more than ninety countries and regulate various points in candidate selection processes (Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2005a). Although these mechanisms have now diffused to diverse countries around the globe, a closer look reveals that the origins of these policy responses differ substantially across world regions. In Western Europe, women’s policy machineries were created largely due to the efforts of women’s movements to pressure political leaders as part of a broader set of demands put forward by second wave feminists. Likewise, most gender quotas were adopted voluntarily by political parties – most often on the left or center-left – as a result of mobilization by women inside the parties. In Latin America, however, calls for state feminism were articulated by domestic and transnational women’s movement activists, with the support of numerous international actors, at a time when many newly democratizing states in the region were eager to secure international legitimacy. Similarly, most gender quotas were established by national legislatures – in many cases by nearly unanimous votes – due to pressures from domestic women’s movements, transnational networks, and international organizations.
What are the implications of different origins of state feminism and gender quotas? Are these mechanisms more successful or effective when they are products of sustained mobilization “from below” or when they are imposed “from above”? Research on state feminism is agnostic on these questions, anticipating that the “characteristics of women’s movements and/or the policy environment” will explain the “activities and characteristics of the women’s policy agencies” (Lovenduski 2005, 9; cf. Mazur 2001; Outshoorn 2004; Stetson 2001). Some of the literature on gender quotas is more categorical, claiming that “quotas that rest on a previous mobilization and integration of women into all parts of society have a better chance of success than those without this precondition, that is, to lead to the permanent empowerment of women and equal political citizenship” (Dahlerup 2003; cf. Dahlerup 1986). In this paper, we explore the scope and validity of these conclusions through a comparative analysis of the origins and impact of state feminism and gender quotas in Western Europe and Latin America. In the first section, we outline the origins of these strategies to identify the main actors, motivations, and contextual influences that led to the adoption of state feminism and gender quotas in the two regions. In the second section, we compare the impact of these origins by considering (1) the general influence and power of women’s policy machineries, as well as the ambition and scope of their policy initiatives, and (2) the overall effect of quota policies on women’s descriptive and substantive representation. In the final section, we conclude with some comparative lessons for countries in other regions around the world.
The origins of state feminism and gender quotas
Initiatives to incorporate women and women’s concerns into public policy-making have a long and varied history at the national and international levels (Berkovitch 1999; Towns 2004). As a result, despite common sources of inspiration like the United Nations, women’s policy agencies and gender quota policies take a variety of different forms across countries. State feminism has been employed by researchers to denote at least three distinct and even contradictory phenomena: alliances between women in political office and women in state bureaucracies to create a ‘women-friendly’ polity, efforts by predominantly male politicians to bestow new rights on women to gain internal and external legitimacy for a modernizing regime, and work by feminists inside the state apparatus to integrate gender and promote women’s interests when devising public policy (Mazur 2002; Randall 1998; Stetson and Mazur 1995; Threlfall 1998). Similarly, gender quotas fall into one of three categories: reserved seats, which set aside a certain number of seats for women among elected representatives; party quotas, which aim to increase the proportion of women among a particular party’s candidates; and legislative quotas, which require all parties to nominate a certain percentage of women among their candidates (Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2005a).
The origins of state feminism and gender quotas in Western Europe
In Western Europe, state feminism has generally taken either the form of alliances between women in political office and women in state bureaucracies, or the form of work of women inside the state apparatus. Gender quotas appear almost exclusively as party quotas, with a few notable exceptions: after several unsuccessful experiments with party quotas, Belgium adopted a 33% legislative quota in 1994, which it increased to 50% in 2002, while France adopted a 50% quota in 1999-2000 (Krook, Lovenduski, and Squires 2006).[1] Demands for both types of measures followed in the wake of second wave feminist mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s, as women’s groups increasingly began to view states and political parties as potential sites for the representation of women’s concerns. Elite actors, for their part, responded to these demands for a number of reasons, often related to calculations about electoral competition, but also in certain instances – in a much more limited way – as a result of the activities of regional and international actors.
The alliance-version of state feminism characterizes the Scandinavian welfare states. Scholars explain women’s relatively high status in this region with reference to state policies that enable women to combine motherhood with work outside the home. According to these accounts, ‘women-friendly’ policy is the combined result of the mobilization of women in civil society and the entry of increased numbers of women into political office and public administration. Exerting pressure inside and outside the state apparatus, these women aim to transform the state into an instrument for improving women’s situation by granting women new social rights and taking steps to ensure their political inclusion, strategies that they view not so much as gender policies aimed at improving women’s status than as social policies intended to create greater social equality (Bergqvist and Findlay 1999; Siim 1991). Some characterize this shift in policy direction in terms of a move from a private to a public patriarchy, however, because women have as a result become increasingly dependent on the state as clients in the social system, as workers in the public sector, and as consumers of social services (Hernes 1987a; Hernes 1987b).
The state apparatus-version of state feminism, in contrast, refers to efforts by feminists inside the state, often in specialized women’s policy machineries, to pursue social and economic policies beneficial to women. These ‘femocrats’ work in special units charged with promoting women’s rights – like offices, commissions, agencies, ministries, committees, secretaries, or advisers for the status of women – but their ranks increasingly include feminist bureaucrats in other parts of the state apparatus who seek to integrate a gender perspective in their own specialized policy fields (Stetson and Mazur 1995). Although the first women’s bureaus were promoted by the League of Nations and the International Alliance of Women (Berkovitch 1999), most current incarnations were created after the United Nations World Conference on Women in 1975. The initial task of these state bureaucracies was to advance the situation of women in education, politics, and the economy, but they were later made responsible for ‘mainstreaming’ – or considering the gendered implications of all public policy – following the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 (True and Mintrom 2001). This type of state feminism overlaps with alliance-based state feminism in Scandinavia, but generally involves a much broader range of variation among individual women’s policy agencies. While most have a relatively wide scope, in the sense that they are not restricted to one single issue area, they diverge greatly in terms of their budgets and staff, the length of their mandate, their closeness to the executive, the feminist backgrounds of their agency heads, and their policy priorities (Lovenduski 2005, 1, 15).
Despite these variations, most women’s policy agencies in have expanded their focus over time: many started with a focus on economic issues, which had been a major element in state policies on women in the early twentieth century (Berkovitch 1999; Mazur 2001), but eventually turned to questions like reproductive rights in the 1960s and 1970s (Stetson 2001) and prostitution in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Outshoorn 2004).[2] The European Union has influenced many of these policy developments, particularly those that address women as workers (Hoskyns 2001; Rees 1998), but also those that touch on issues like domestic violence and sexual harassment (Kantola 2004; Zippel 2004). In addition, conferences organized by the United Nations have provided opportunities for women’s movement activists to learn new ways to reframe issues like forced prostitution and trafficking in terms of human rights violations and international labour law – rather than simply as moral issues – thus introducing new ideas into domestic policy debates (Outshoorn 2004, 10-11).
Gender quotas rose to the political agenda as part of the work of women’s policy agencies (Lovenduski 2005), but most discussions surrounding such measures generally took place within the political parties, rather than at the level of the state. While initial policies in the 1960s and 1970s tended to involve only informal measures to promote female candidates, by the 1980s political parties had devised a wide range of more formal quota strategies, which included gender-specific quota policies (“40% women”), gender-neutral quota targets (“no more than 60% of the same sex”), systems of ‘zipping’ or alternation (a 50% quota implemented by alternating between women and men on party lists), and all-women shortlists (a mechanism to ensure the selection of women in single-member districts).[3] In the late 1980s and early 1990s, debates over political representation led to the establishment of quotas for women in state administrative positions (Sainsbury 2004) and appointed bodies in local government (Holli 2004). In several cases, they inspired legal reforms to ensure that all parties nominated a certain proportion of women among their electoral candidates (Gaspard 1998; Guadagnini 1998; Meier 2004).
In all cases, these measures originated in demands for increased representation made by women inside and outside the political parties (Christensen 1999; Leijenaar 1997). Some learned of quota policies through the Socialist International, whose meetings brought together socialist and social democratic parties from all over the world. In the late 1980s, women from these parties began to share information with one another about successful quota strategies, leading the organization to pass a resolution in favour of gender quotas (Russell 2005; Valiente 2005; Wisler 1999). Other women proposed their own quota policies, or alternatively, drew on gains made by women in other parties to press for changes in their own parties (Caul 2006; Sainsbury 1993; Skjeie 1992).
Male elites in all cases proved crucial to quota adoption, although they often supported quotas to achieve other policy goals. Many scholars observe, for example, that while some parties appear to adopt quotas for normative reasons related to their party ideology or beliefs about the importance of group representation (Kolinsky 1991; Opello 2006; Meier 2000), most adopt quotas after one of their rivals establishes them (Caul 2001; Davidson-Schmich 2006; Kaiser 2001; Matland and Studlar 1996; Meier 2004; Opello 2006; Wängnerud 2001). In many instances, this is because they believe that quotas will enable them to close a gap in support among female voters (Kolinsky 1991; Perrigo 1996; Steininger 2000). In the case of legislative quotas, however, this support appears to be an empty gesture: interviews suggest that these measures are often passed nearly unanimously because parliamentary elites believe that quota policies will be deemed unconstitutional or illegal before they can ever be applied (Mossuz-Lavau 1998). In contrast, international influences were generally much less important to elite calculations, as compared with quota debates in other regions of the world (Krook, Lovenduski, and Squires 2006; cf. Krook forthcoming).
The origins of state feminism and gender quotas in Latin America
In Latin America, state feminism has largely been inspired by women’s movement organizing, but it has ultimately taken the form of initiatives by male politicians – usually presidents – who lend support to women’s rights as a means for gaining national and international legitimacy. In line with this trend, gender quotas have almost exclusively involved legislative quotas, with several exceptions: only party quotas exist in Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Calls for both sets of measures emerged out of a convergence of two factors: democratization and increased attention to gender rights at the international level. These factors, taken together, created opportunities for women’s rights advocates to expand activist networks at the regional and international levels and to put gender issues on national political agendas.
All countries in the region have national women’s policy machineries, charged with promoting gender equity through public policy. Many countries also have ombudsmen for women, or a representative for gender rights within the ombudsman’s office. Most countries have parliamentary committees for women’s issues. Finally, some countries have created institutions within the judicial branch that help to defend women’s rights (ECLAC 2004, 75). In addition to these national mechanisms, gender equality and women’s rights are also promoted through regional institutions, especially through the Women’s Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS). A good example is the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women, a regional treaty that has been ratified by all Latin American countries (Stacy 2004, 34). All countries in the region now have domestic violence legislation, most of it adopted between 1995 and 2000. As a result of developments such as these, a report by the United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) notes that “a true institutional network [for promoting gender equity] is thus forming, which often transcends national boundaries and extends to the sphere of international or non-state public affairs.” (ECLAC 2004, 75).