The Implementation of Gender Quotas across Different Levels of Government: The Case of Portugal

Following the international trend, Portugal adopted legislative quotas in 2006 for three kinds of elections: European, legislative, and local. Since political parties are crucial as gatekeepers, this paper focuses on the Socialist Party (PS). This is a major Portuguese party and was one of the proponents of the Parity Law. Most importantly, it exhibits clear differences in terms of policy outcomes: it visibly overcame the Parity Law for the European 2014 elections, it fulfilled it — though without a big margin — for the legislative elections (in 2015), and it did not comply with it in a few civil parishes (freguesias) for the local elections (in 2013). Since the Parity Law applies equally to the three kinds of election and given that the electoral system is the same across all levels of government, the differences found within the PS are intriguing. The main objective of this paper is therefore to understand the reasons behind those differences. In order to do that, we realised 20 interviews with key persons within the PS in which we aimed to explore the party nomination procedures across levels of government. Several factors emerged as relevant for explaining the differences found, including the level of centralisation of the recruitment process, the inclusiveness of the selectorate, the pool of female candidates (supply), the presence of critical actors, concerns with the external image of Portugal, and the weight of the public opinion. These findings shed light on the implementation of gender quotas more broadly and suggest that specificities of each level of government interact with both formal and informal party nomination procedures.