Strong ‘Second Order’ Quotas in Action: Lessons from the Finnish Case

From the 1970s onwards, three Nordic countries (Norway, Finland and Iceland) have adopted legal gender quotas for public commissions and boards. The Finnish quotas (from 1995 onwards) of such a format, decreeing a balance of at least 40 percent of women and men in the membership of all public preparatory bodies as well as the executive branch of local government, have been claimed to be the strongest of the kind. The paper investigates the situation in Finland 15-20 years after the second order quotas were successfully implemented. What has happened with quotas? What is the state of their implementation today and which factors explain potential variations in compliance at state-level between various types of institutions and branches of government? The paper builds on previous findings which indicate the institutional factors explaining the differences of implementation between local level (full compliance) and the state level (variations in compliance). The paper is based on author’s collection of extensive quantitative and qualitative data concerning two types of preparatory institutions (commissions of inquiry, ministerial EU-divisions) from 2000 to the present.