Gender Quotas and Women’s Political Representation: Setting a Research Agenda

In many countries around the world, women continue to be excluded from decision-making processes. They are under-represented in political institutions and policymaking and are unable to voice their opinions through legitimate representatives. The result is that women have fewer opportunities to contribute to the improvement of their own well-being by pushing for laws and policies that further their interests. This paper aims to synthesise the available evidence on gender quotas and women’s representation. A scoping review methodology, based on the framework by Arksey and O’Malley, was adopted for this study. While the methodology is increasingly used in other disciplines, it is underutilised in the social sciences in general and political sciences in particular, yet it can make an important contribution to the field, as it can be used to examine the extent, range and nature of research activity and identify research gaps in the existing literature. Per the review protocol, a search strategy was developed and applied to five electronic databases (Scopus, Sociological Abstracts, Web of science, ProQuest and Google Scholar). The search was limited to English language articles published between 1990 and 2019. 1179 citations were generated from the search, downloaded into a reference manager database and duplicates were excluded, resulting in 594 articles to be screened. A title and abstract review was done and 226 articles were selected for review based on an inclusion criteria (peer-reviewed articles and doctoral theses focusing on gender quota). Another 14 articles were added to the selection as a result of reference mining, making a total of 240. Data on the characteristics and content of the studies were extracted into a database. Categories included the focus country, level of government, branch of government, type of gender quota and themes addressed. Most of the studies focused on particular countries and regions like Europe and Latin America and themes such as the effectiveness and impact of quotas on the different types of women’s representation (descriptive, substantive and symbolic); factors that promote or hinder the implementation of quotas; how electoral systems influence quota effectiveness; and advocacy for gender quotas including actors, factors and conditions that catalyse, facilitate or inhibit quota adoption. There was however sparse evidence countries in Asia, Africa and middle East, as well as themes like the spill over effect from one branch or level of government to another or from the political domain into others such as business; the effectiveness of gender quotas in hybrid or authoritarian regimes; the impact of (de)democratisation on quotas; intersectionality that is how signifiers such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or class, interact with quotas; the use of quotas at the subnational level; how party ideology affects the adoption and/or implementation of quotas; the effect of quotas on women’s representation in supra-national bodies like the European Union; and the impact of rescinding quotas on women’s representation. This paper identifies the research gaps and areas for future empirical research and demonstrates the need to examine the distal and complex factors which affect quota effectiveness.