‘United in Diversity?’ Assessing the Effect of Varied Gender Quotas on Legislator Experience in the European Parliament

The comparative institutions literature on female elected representation suggests a number of possible outcomes for institutional designs that work to bolster female representation in traditionally male-dominated legislatures. An important corollary to this debate is whether electoral institutions and intra-party rules that favor the recruitment and nomination of female legislative candidates not only increase the proportion of elected female representatives, but also whether these programs improve the overall quality of this representation. In this paper, we explore the connection between the promotion of women in legislative politics and its effect on candidate quality in the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections. As one of the largest democratically elected bodies in the world, the EP offers a particularly novel laboratory for the study of comparative institutional design, with EU member states allowed great latitude in the creation of both national-level rules for electing their legislators and party level rules for candidate nominations. Using information collected for all currently elected members of the EP, we examine how the relationship between political party system and electoral system features meant to favor female representation – such as party-level selection and recruitment requirements and nomination quotas – can help or hurt candidate quality and experience at the EU level. Our findings suggest that the EU’s famed motto of ‘united in diversity’ may have unintended consequences for the only directly elected branch of EU governing.