New Directions in Gender Quotas Research: Legitimacy, Diversity, and Power

Abstract

Quotas are widely used by political parties and states around the world. The scholarly consensus is that, by and large, quotas are an effective "fast track" solution at boosting numbers of women in office. Increasingly, research on gender quotas is moving beyond understanding how quotas impact descriptive representation to investigating other, related outcomes of interest. The manuscripts in this panel address some of these key questions, namely: Who (which candidates?) benefits from gender quotas? How are gender quotas perceived by the public? And, can gender quotas facilitate access to executive power? The contributions by Hughes and Grahn both focus on the important question of whether gender quotas usher in the election of diverse, minoritized and immigrant-background, women. Moving beyond descriptive representation, Brulé considers whether quotas for ethnicity and gender can reduce barriers to inter-group interactions in society. Gatto and Thomé turn to the question of how gender and racial quotas are perceived by the public, exploring factors that shape different levels of support for these in Brazil. Similarly, in their study Clayton and O'Brien investigate whether gender quotas degrade or confer democratic legitimacy among citizens in a sample of eleven democracies. Finally, Barnes, Venturini and Weeks explore the extent to which electoral gender quotas can increase not only women in parliaments but women in governments worldwide. The contributions take a comparative perspective, focusing on a wide sample of countries and employing a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. Together, these studies provide novel insights into whether and how gender quotas confer legitimacy, diversity, and power.

Title	Details
Gender Quota Laws and Executive Power	View Paper Details
Gender Quotas and the Diversity of Elected Women	View Paper Details
Preferences for electoral quotas: attitudes toward underrepresented groups and support for gender and racial quotas	View Paper Details
Intersecting inequalities: multiple candidate quotas do not (really) empower young women with an immigrant background	View Paper Details
Electoral Gender Quotas and Democratic Legitimacy	View Paper Details
Do Multi-dimensional Quotas Improve Social Equality? Intersectional Representation & Group Relations.	View Paper Details