'Saving a Seat': Electoral Security of Incumbents and Gender Quota Adoption in Brazil

Altering the rules of the electoral game creates uncertainty and may pose threats to the political power and stability of incumbents. That is because institutions are, ultimately, instruments that distribute power. In this sense, politicians’ behaviour may be defined by subjects’ desires to maximise their political power and goals. Scholars such as Arend Lijphart, Barbara Geddes, and Carles Boix, have all made arguments of endogenous institutional change, which claim that politicians adopt or reform institutions perceived to better serve their political interests. Said rational, goal-driven politicians have, however, often adopted institutions that are apparently suboptimal from an electoral perspective. This is the case of gender quotas, which, as affirmative action policies for women, limit the space for men – the vast majority of political incumbents. So why do male-dominated parliaments adopt gender quotas, institutions that have the potential of rendering seats scarcer and threaten to kill the political careers of some of the male parliamentarians who adopted it? - Given the notion that politicians should not be expected to adopt political institutions that threaten their careers, I hypothesise that: perceived levels of electoral security impact the adoption of gender quotas - thus, the less threatened incumbents and political parties feel, the more likely they will be to vote for gender quotas. To test this hypothesis, I quantitatively assess how perceived levels of electoral security impacted the voting behaviour of individual incumbents in respect to gender quota adoption in Brazil.